Paul Dano (2018)
The happy-family veneer of the post-World War II American household has rarely been thinner than in Paul Dano’s directing debut Wildlife, adapted by him and Zoe Kazan from a 1990 novel of the same name by Richard Ford. In the opening scene, Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) calls brightly from the kitchen that dinner’s ready. Her husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) and their teenage son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) come in from playing football together in the back garden. The well groomed Jeanette and Jack radiate wholesomeness. Their mealtime conversation is affable. Yet the air crackles with unspoken tensions. The Brinsons’ son already looks sad and desperate to please.
The family are newcomers to Great Falls, Montana, which goes some way to explaining Joe’s lack of social contact with other kids in the neighbourhood. Jerry has taken on a golf pro job at a local club but it doesn’t last long; we learn that he’s had and lost jobs, and the family has therefore had to move home, before. After firing him for his too familiar manner with club members, the management thinks again and offers to reinstate Jerry but he’s too proud to agree. While he languishes at home, Jeanette gets work as a swimming instructor. By now, it’s quite evident that the Brinsons’ marriage is in trouble and that their earlier cheerful manner was a facade. How much the problems are the result of incompatibility, how much a consequence of Jerry’s erratic employment record is less clear. He now decides to work, for peanuts, in a team of men fighting forest fires in the mountains above Great Falls, and disappears there for a large part of Wildlife. (With Gyllenhaal in the part, it’s occasionally hard to keep Brokeback Mountain out of your mind.) One of Jeanette’s swimming students is Warren Miller (Bill Camp), a middle-aged widower and local car dealer. Jeanette stops teaching and gets a job with Miller instead. What her role actually involves becomes a matter of increasing anxiety to her son, especially in light of the evening he and his mother spend at Miller’s and what Joe subsequently discovers when he returns home one day.
As you’d expect, Wildlife is very ably acted by its two more experienced leads but that’s part of what’s wrong with it: Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal nail their characters in short order. This doesn’t mean that either actor becomes uninteresting. You miss Gyllenhaal when he’s gone and welcome his return. The contrast between Mulligan’s crisp exterior and underlying despair is vividly sharp. She makes Jeanette’s eagerness to flaunt her affair with Miller to Joe both dislikeable and sad. Once the miserablist die is cast, though, there’s only so much that Mulligan and Gyllenhaal can do: there are few surprises in store and the situation doesn’t develop much further depth. (The film sometimes suggests a stretched-thin adaptation of a short story.) Ed Oxenbould is problematic. Although I don’t know the Ford original, I came out of the film feeling sure Joe must be the novel’s first-person narrator (and he is). Dano and Kazan bravely eschew voiceover narration but the result is that Joe is stuck with suffering in silence. Both parents, at different times and at some length, tell their troubles to their son: Oxenbould’s face is unusual but not expressive enough to show us more than that Joe is understandably unhappy. His isolation at school and muted response to Ruth-Ann (Zoe Margaret Colletti), a classmate who obviously likes him, are puzzling – other than as a reflection of his situation at home.
There’s symbolism at work in the story – the out-of-the-way forest fire, the information that Jerry’s work in the mountains will end when the snows arrive. He duly returns home in winter and the Brinsons’ marriage goes up in flames (so too, nearly, does Warren Miller’s home, when Jerry sets it alight). The date is 1960. The decade just ended was remarkable for, inter alia, the widespread growth of economic prosperity (in which the Brinsons can only superficially pretend to share); medical confirmation of the dangers of smoking; and increasing fears of nuclear war. The years immediately ahead will reinforce all three of these trends. Before Jerry thinks of taking to firefighting, a ranger gives a talk at Joe’s school, explaining the benefits to nature of the forest blazes but the health risks to people of inhaling smoke. Ruth-Ann tells Joe not to bother taking notes of the ranger’s talk. With a forest fire as with an atomic bomb, she says, if you know it’s coming it’s already too late.
Joe works at weekends and sometimes after school at the studio of a local photographer (Darryl Cox). The choice of job seems designed purely to bring about the final scene of Wildlife, in which the boy takes his now estranged parents into the studio, sets up the equipment and takes a photograph of the three of them seated together. This is the film’s closing shot, one that confirms the prevailing constriction of the whole piece. It would be unfair, however, to dismiss Paul Dano’s first feature as a typical actor’s debut behind the camera. He shows a strong and mature visual sense. The images, finely lit by Diego García, are sometimes obviously controlled but those of the Montana landscape are consistently impressive. In the manmade world, a shot of a petrol station and a melancholy human scene glimpsed through plate glass windows evoke Edward Hopper paintings. The sensitive score is by David Lang.
15 November 2018
