FILM OF THE WEEK
Wildlife Cert: 12A; Now showing
Sometimes the kitchen sink is all you need for riveting drama, as some of the greatest directors have shown us. At 34, Paul Dano, the actor who set fire to the screen in There Will Be Blood and Love & Mercy, equips himself with this knowledge as he steps behind the camera for the first time to adapt Richard Ford’s 1990 novel.
Ed Oxenbould plays Joe, a 14-yearold in small-town Montana in 1960. When father Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses his job as a greenskeeper at the local golf club, he slumps into a depressive stupor that cannot be shaken off despite the best efforts of wife Jean (Carey Mulligan). Jerry gets it in his head that he must enrol to help fight the huge seasonal wildfires that loom on the smoky horizon and heads off to scratch that itch.
Jean and Joe are left behind as he indulges himself, both forced into the workplace and made to examine the particulars of their family unit. Seeking her own outlet, Jean embarks on an affair with a prosperous local business owner, unravelling Joe’s world further.
There is a lot going on in this kitchen-table battleground and its startlingly young soldiers. Apple Pie America is dismantled, and an unemployed man becomes so untethered that he runs to an inferno to retrieve his masculinity. Jean sings even louder in the screenplay, a typified domestic pillar allowed to become as flawed as the rest of us.
Co-writing with partner and fellow actor Zoe Kazan, Dano italicises the distant fires, the Hopper-esque listlessness of the post-war years, and a bright young boy’s loss of innocence. Mulligan is imperious in an excellent three-way cast, as woodwinds and setting sunlight float through the frame.