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.

Mudbound Is Compelling Character-Driven Fare That Knows The Power of Well-Written Dialogue

 

The individual characters in Mudbound have their own stories to tell and their own personalities to convey but there are threads that do tie certain characters together. Some of these individuals find themselves connected by the fact that they're a family while a pair of characters find themselves intertwined to one another due to both of them being soldiers returning home from World War II with intense trauma impacting their psyches. But what unites them all, whether they realize it or not, is the soil, the mud on the land they all share. In this harsh environment of rural 1940's Mississippi, you're at the mercy of the very land you live on, a land that entails all kinds of fascinating human beings that populate the new Dee Rees motion picture Mudbound.