Carey Mulligan’s slow burn prevails over Jake Gyllenhaal’s untamed theatrics
THERE’S a Bermuda Triangle of sorts that sits at the centre of “Wildlife,” an absorbing yet offkilter domestic drama from firsttime filmmaker Paul Dano, the actor-turned-director who, with actress and significant other Zoe Kazan, has adapted Richard Ford’s disturbing 1990 novel of a family unravelling.
In the midst of this stormy zone, the lives of three people get sucked into a quiet yet relentless vortex of dysfunction: brooding, alcoholic golf pro Jerry Brinson (Jake Gyllenhaal); his vivacious yet unfulfilled wife, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan); and their bewildered 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould).
It’s those three characters around whom the story (set in 1960s Montana) swirls, though there are other significant forces at play. When Jerry is fired from his job at the country club — settling for a lower-paying job fighting a remote wildfire, against his wife’s wishes — a lonely and resentful Jeanette begins an increasingly heated dalliance with Warren (Bill Camp), the well-off, much older owner of a car dealership. Joe, who has started an after-school job to help make ends meet, spends a bit of his free time hanging out with a friendly classmate (Zoe Margaret Colletti), but most of his focus is on keeping the home fires burning, i.e., maintaining the peace between Mom and Dad.
For much of the film, Jerry is out of the picture, camping out with firefighters in the mountains. But his presence looms large, even in absence. For a kid as self-sufficient as Joe — he makes dinner when Jeanette forgets, and he drives her home from her boyfriend’s house when she’s too drunk — stepping into the role of man of the house to stabilise an unstable dynamic is a tall order.
Written and directed with an uncanny ear for Ford’s spare literary style, in which much of the drama roils just beneath the surface, and an eye for mid-century Montana’s Hopperlike emptiness, the film can feel stagy and artificial at times. Gyllenhaal’s early scenes, in particular, are somewhat stiff and one-note, simmering somewhere between repressed, impotent rage and volcanic outbursts, with little variation. When Jerry finally returns home to discover that all is not well, his reaction feels overblown.