Wildlife Is A Quietly Haunting Portrait of Family Chaos from Newbie Director Paul Dano

Hollywood, when it comes to non-indie fare, has always seemed to struggle with what to do with Paul Dano as an actor, usually putting him in the roles of either a disposable sidekick (Knight & Day) or a whiny slimeball (Cowboys & Aliens). Despite that, Dano has managed to procure a number of memorable performances over a little over a decade of steady work in offbeat indie fare like There Will Be Blood, Love & Mercy and Swiss Army Man, to name just a few. Over the course of a quietly impressive acting career, Paul Dano's become quite a fascinating actor and now we can add talented director to his resume with his directorial debut Wildlife.


The Brinson family needs a change of pace. That's why they, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) and 14-year-old Joe (Ed Oxenbould) have all packed their things and moved into a rental house in Great Falls, Montana and so far, things are going...well, things are complicated. Jerry just lost his job and Jeanette is now teaching swimming lessons at the YMCA to earn money for the family. Soon, Jerry decides to sign up as a firefighter to go take care of a wildfire, a mission that'll take him away from his family for a prolonged period of time. From here, the family begins to fall apart, a phenomenon told through the perspective of Joe, who is beginning to learn how his parents are actually a pair of complex human beings.

This grim tale is told in a quiet manner that ensures there's little in the way of major chaos occuring in the runtime (I know you'll be shocked, but there are no major car chases or action sequences to be found here) and even David Lang's original score is muted to a point that many scenes transpire to the tune of silence. Through this restrained means, the brutal impact that the gradual collapse of this family unit has on Ed is supposed to be felt in a pronounced manner. On that front, mission accomplished, Wildlife's depiction of Ed coming to terms with his family falling apart around him is an emotionally trying experience, especially since Dano and Zoe Kazan's script makes the smart decision to intentionally have the audience carry a greater recognition of what's happening than the main character.

Whereas the viewer likely know the real reason why Jeanette would return to the house of Mr. Miller (Bill Camp) for "her coat", poor Ed must travel up to the house and gaze into the window of the house to see his mother french kissing another man to realize what's going on. Ed struggling to fully understand the matters happening around him is an effective way of wringing poignancy out of delicate emotional moments in Wildlife as well as a mighty accurate way to portray a 14-year-old's perspective on family strife. The story of Wildlife ends up being Ed being dragged through the flames of tragedy into adulthood, and while I did occasionally wish he had more of a standalone personality to his name, these coming-of-age experiences of his prove to be extremely well-realized on a writing level.

The same can be said for the character of Jeanette, who provides plenty of memorable material for Carey Mulligan to bring to life. Portraying a woman who's constantly had to put herself on the backburner for her husband, Jeanette's life opens up once Jerry heads off to fight a forest fire and Mulligan depicts this new side of the character with an uninhibited nature informed by both weariness over what her life's been up to this point and determination to change things for the better. It's a deftly-written character full of all kinds of tiny complexities that Mulligan brings to life with a performance brimming with a riveting sense of effortless conviction. No wonder Wildlife opts for a restrained approach when a performance like Carey Mulligan's can speak so much in the smallest of ways.

It's also interesting to watch Jake Gyllenhaal continue his fantastic recent streak of unorthodox indie performances with a turn as Jerry that sees Jake Gyllenhaal inhabiting a persistently frustrated man that feels unlike anything else Gyllenhaal's done before. Both Jerry and Jeanette are people confined by the boxes typical 1960s American nuclear family models put them in, but whereas Jeanette leaps at the first chance to break out those models, Gyllenhaal's performance makes it abundantly clear how Jerry would do anything to once again inhabit the "Father Knows Best/Breadwinner" archetype again, even if that means going to fight a wildfire a massive distance away from your family. Persistence and tragedy are the two lynchpins of Gyllenhaal's terrific supporting performance in Wildlife.

Mulligan and Gyllenhaal, as well as Ed Oxenbould and Bill Camp, have their performances captured through exceptional direction, cinematography and editing. Wildlife has plenty of subtly brilliant visual traits to it names, including calculated editing that knows to keep certain shots running for a prolonged period of time so that the mood of a specific scene be established without any jarring cuts getting in the way. The camerawork of the motion pictures frequently opts for wide shots that tend to evoke an intentionally disarming sense of unease by emphasizing just how alone the characters are in their new Montana home. When Jeanette walks to a job interview, for instance, we see her do this in a wide shot that has her walking down sparsely populated streets, she's practically walking through a ghost town. The Brinson family is just as isolated from the town they call home as they are from each other.  That's the kind of visual detail that cements the chilling atmosphere of Paul Dano's directorial debut Wildlife as an ideal one to tell this story of a family in the prolonged process of collapsing before the eyes of one 14-year-old boy.