'Wildlife' Is a Rare & Incisive Wonder

Let me tell you a story as old as time. A story where being a man means to have power and money and, where power and money lacks, to ask pride, anger and violence for answers to one’s existential emptiness. A story where being a woman means understanding one’s sexuality as her most valuable commodity and, where that fails, raking the Earth to remedy the sadness that ensues. A story where our parents weren’t always our parents, which sets us free from the need to emulate their human failings. A story where our duties and impulses sometimes merge, sometimes collide and explode. It’s a wild life.

Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan’s film is worthy of all the nonsensical adjectives typically affixed to a movie’s tagline, “dazzling,” “spectacular,” “masterful,” with cinematography so wonderful it could almost hold its own were you to cut the dialogue altogether. Although you wouldn’t want to do that because every word is measured to perfection, touching on some profound human truth, yet somehow unassuming. Just, wow.

If cinema is where escapism meets art, then Wildlife is cinema par excellence (hey look I’m French, I get to be pedantic). A world of its own where 105 minutes feel like the year they depict, and that manages to be a good thing, the film is slow and probably divisive, but God I loved it. Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal play Jeanette and Jerry, a couple who move to Montana from Idaho in 1960 with their 14-year-old son Joe, portrayed by Ed Oxenbould. When Jerry is fired from his job at a golf course, he signs up to help combat the wildfire that is spreading across the area, a decision which escalates Jean’s unhappiness and alters her irrevocably.

From the start, we see that Jean and Jerry speak to Joe like an equal, rather than a child, and his sweet, mild, intelligent manner of observing the world acts as a buffer to their emotional upheaval. They love him and he loves them and that’s almost all that matters. Frequent close-ups of the three protagonists carry the film better than any run-of-the-mill action scene could. Mulligan, Gyllenhaal and Oxenbould’s acting is gorgeous and breathtaking amid the gorgeous and breathtaking setting, the town, the mountains, the interiors, the supermarket. The fire spreading like poison to the nuclear family, who are at once animal and desperately human.

10/10