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Wildlife
****
Dir: Paul Dano
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Carey Mulligan
(USA, 12A, 1hr 44 mins)
Actor Paul Dano makes his directorial debut with a script he and long-time partner Zoe Kazan adapted from Richard Ford’s typically excoriating novel about familial relationships, and rather good it is too.
Set in 1960’s Montana, it follows a family amidst a breakdown. Jake Gyllenhaal is Jerry, a beer drinking dad who gets fired from his job working at a golf course and in a moment of madness decides to go off and fight a forest fire with the other men of the town, leaving behind his wife and son. Seen through the lens of his 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), we observe the tension in the marriage between Gyllenhaal and a revelatory Carey Mulligan as his wife Jeanette.
She is stretched to breaking point, having had enough of being the housewife and embarking on a frustrated flirtation with another man; Mr Miller, the antithesis of her husband, played with sleazy grace by Bill Camp. It’s a minute dissection of a turbulent relationship through the kaleidoscope of an America on the verge of discovering feminism, all suppressed emotion and yearning for something better, something other.
As a director, Dano is a keen observer of the minutiae of the family unit and brings out very strong performances from all of his cast. Mulligan is empathetic but often unlikeable, abandoning care of her son for her own reckless pursuits. The marriage is suffocating her and she wonders if there’s anything beyond her suburban emptiness?
The script fizzes with observation, the period detail is meticulous and the pent-up longing from all is palpable. In eyes of both Mulligan and Gyllenhall, Oxenbould’s teen is the future of an America that doesn’t know what it wants to do with itself and thus feels rather timely. A relationship piece (and much more) that gets under your skin.
words Keiron Self
Out now in cinemas