Harrelson has a talent to annoy
The problem with the overbearing, over-sharing protagonist is that he can get on the audience’s nerves as easily as make them laugh. As the title character in Wilson, based on a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Art School Confidential), Woody Harrelson walks that thin line but manages to slip off to one side as often as the other.
Wilson is middle-aged and, 17 years after being left by his wife, Pippi, decides it might be time to move forward a little in his life. But a chance reunion with his ex (Laura Dern), brings news that the baby he thought she’d aborted was in fact given up for adoption. His new mission becomes to find the child and reconnect. He drags Pippi along for the ride.
Isabella Amara plays said daughter, Claire, and reacts noncommittally to the sudden presence of her birth parents in her life. A trip to a sad little funland goes about as well as could be expected with a 17-year-old in tow, but things get worse when they pay a visit to Pippi’s brittle, holier-than-thou sister, nicely played by Cheryl Hines.
Clowes adapted his own graphic novel into the screenplay, apparently quite faithfully, which may be part of the film’s problem; not everything translates easily from page to screen, and the resulting structure has a shambling, episodic feeling.
Worse, Wilson arrives with very little backstory other than that long-ago marriage. How does he support himself? What has he been up to all these years? How does anyone manage to find camera flash cubes in 2017? The movie isn’t saying. It’s also difficult to buy Dern’s performance as a recovering addict; just saying the words doesn’t make the character so.
Director Craig Johnson has handled odd family dynamics before; his 2014 film Skeleton Twins, with Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, was a minor festival darling, picking up a screenplay prize in Edinburgh and nominations elsewhere. But its success owed a large debt to the actors, and Harrelson doesn’t have enough character to ground himself in this one; Wilson exists as a collection of tics and eccentricities that occasionally collide with other, less damaged psyches. It’s amusing when it works, flat when it doesn’t.