Wildlife
Actor Paul Dano's directorial debut is tender and heartfelt, and anchored by a knockout performance from Carey Mulligan
There are many reasons to cherish tender family drama Wildlife, the directorial debut from actor Paul Dano. Chief among them is Carey Mulligan, who gives by some margin the finest performance of her career as Jeanette, the upstanding matriarch of a small, slightly-sad little family who’ve recently moved to Great Falls, a sleepy town in Montana. It’s the beginning of the 60s, and Jeanette is the epitome of the “good wife”: meatloaf on the table, diligent and supportive to her feckless husband, but screaming on the inside.
Jeanette is the mother to Joe (Ed Oxenbould), a watchful young man who’s 14 going on 40. Jeanette's husband, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), could use some of that maturity. The golf pro at a local course, he’s given his marching orders near the start of the movie for continually gambling with his customers. “I’m too well liked,” he tells Joe. “That’s my problem.” Two thirds of the brood take this blow to their household finances on the chin: Joe gets an afterschool job as a photographer's assistant while Jeanette starts teaching swimming at the YMCA. Jerry, pride in tatters, takes to the woods with “a bunch of deadbeats” to put out the raging forest fire that’s heading to town, but the flame his departure sparks in Jeanette is just as ferocious.
Abandoned in Nowheresville, USA, her perfect housewife mask slips to reveal someone looking for more than her lot. This is the rare coming-of-age film where it’s the parents who do the growing, not the kid. Joe unwittingly becomes his parents’ confidant. “Your father and I, we haven’t been intimate lately,” Jeanette tells the boy. “You’re old enough now to hear that.” From the rabbit-in-the-headlights look on Joe’s face, he disagrees. To his horror, the boy’s learning what we all must come to terms with: that our parents are flawed human beings with messy pasts and lives of their own.
Dano’s images, as shot by cinematographer Diego Garcia, suggest Norman Rockwell by way of Edward Hopper. This may be Eisenhower’s America, opening with father and son throwing the ol’ pigskin around a neat little yard, but instead of warm nostalgia there’s a coolness to the images. The 50s are making way for the 60s. In the film’s dynamite closing image, Jeanette, Jerry and Joe – the three Js – are frozen in time, but their lives, and their country, are about to change forever.
Wildlife is released 9 Nov by Icon
For more London Film Festival coverage, click here