Butler's Cinema Scene

Carey Mulligan, Ed Oxenbould, JakeGyllenhaal

“WILDLIFE”  My rating: B+

114 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

In “Wildlife,” the  mesmerizing directorial debut of actor Paul Dano, people — adults, anyway — are perplexing creatures.

A father loses his job at a country club and instead of launching a job search abandons his family for immensely dangerous and low-paying work fighting forest fires. The bitter mother flips almost overnight from June Cleaver domesticity to provocative sexuality.

These near-radical personality changes are hard to fathom — until you realize that Dano’s film (co-written with actress Zoe Kazan from Richard Ford’s novel) centers on the perceptions of the couple’s 14-year-old son. Seen through the kid’s bewildered and traumatized eyes, even the slightest change in familial surroundings registers like an earthquake.

Set in the early 1950s, the film begins with Jerry Brinson (Jake Gyllenhaal) losing his job as the golf pro in a small Montana town.  His wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), who never wanted to move there in the first place, does her best to beef up Jerry’s battered ego and even rejoins the workforce, teaching adult swim classes at the local Y.

All this is tremendously worrying for their 14-year-old son, Joe (a spectacularly good Ed Oxenbould). It’s hard seeing your once-upbeat dad sinking into depression and ennui. And while Mom seems to be enjoying her new economic independence, even that has a downside. She’s not at home all that much.

But Joe’s a good kid and, to help prop up the family’s failing fortunes, signs on as an assistant at the local photographic portrait studio.

Jerry’s decision to join a firefighting crew battling the stubborn blaze — which has burned for weeks in a nearby mountain range, threatening the town not only with flames but lung-congesting smoke — comes as a shock to Jeanette and Joe.  People are getting burned up fighting the conflagration.

“What kind of man leaves his wife and child in such a lonely place?” Jeanette seethes. The poetic theatricality of that line of dialogue (would your average wife phrase it in just that way?) suggests it has been refliltered through Joe’s tormented imagination and memory.

Carey Mulligan, Ed Oxenbould

Now on her own, Jeannette becomes something of a sexual predator. She sets her sights for Mr. Miller (the great Bill Camp), a rich widower in her swim class.  She begins flirting openly, inviting this stranger to her home and, in one skin-crawlingly uncomfortable sequence, taking Joe along for a dinner at Miller’s house where she more or less puts on a neurotic slut show.

Miller vacillates between giving Joe seemingly sincere life lessons and ogling Jeanette like an oil wildcatter at a titty bar.

It doesn’t help that Mom is lying to her kid, telling Joe she’s landed a job at Miller’s auto dealership when actually she’s just his sometimes mistress.

Given the  crazed extremes of the adults’ behavior, the film relies on poor Joe for an emotional anchor, and young Oxenbould delivers and then some.

Great performances usually rely on big juicy scenes and scintillating dialogue. But Oxenbould fashions a compelling, heart-tugging character without ever going big. You can read the confusion and hurt on his face without him saying a word.  It’s some of the best acting we’ll see this year.

It’s difficult to explain just what Dano does here.  Mostly he sets a tone of loss and longing that remains consistent throughout the sometimes hair-raising digressions young Joe witnesses. The result is a coming-of-age movie, yes, but it’s as much about his parents growing up as it is about the kid at the center of it all.

| Robert W. Butler