“Wildlife”: actor Paul Dano shot his first - very sad - film about divorce and growing up.
“Wildlife” - the directorial debut of actor Paul Dano (“There Will Be Blood”, “War & Peace”). Jake Gyllenhaal, Carey Mulligan and 17-year-old Ed Oxenbould played the lead roles. I believe that the young director has a wonderful sad drama about how a teenager and two adults are trying to cope with the disintegration of their own family and find their place in society - but none of this works out.
Nothing wild in this film, of course, no. Provincial boredom, the honorable routine of the American heartland. “Well, you have a wild life here,” Gerry, one of the three heroes of the painting, tries to ironically, returning from his meager earnings and finding that the circumstances in his family have changed. For several weeks he, in the company of other male volunteers, fought forest fires in the impassable forests of Montana, while his wife, Jeanette, tried to start a romance with a local bigwig - a widower and car owner. Moreover, their son, the silent high school student Jo, watched it, feeling his impotence; neither he nor anyone else would have been able to glue the decaying marriage of parents. The year was 1960.
“Wildlife” is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Richard Ford, a respectable American prose writer, Pulitzer Prize winner. Moreover, more importantly, this is a 34-year-old directorial debut (at the time of the premiere he was 33 more) actor Paul Dano, the script for which he wrote with his girlfriend Zoe Kazan. Dano is one of the most talented and ambitious American artists; it is easy to conclude from his filmography. He not only played the latest incarnation of Pierre Bezukhov in the recent War & Peace television show, but also starred in the world's leading directors - Richard Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson, Ang Lee and Spike Jonze, Steve McQueen and Denis Villeneuve, Paolo Sorrentino and Bong Joon-ho . After such a career in directing - the most direct path.
The expectations placed upon him by Dano fulfilled “Wildlife”, with all the seeming modesty and intimacy, aroused the enthusiasm of critics and the public, was shown on “Sundance” and in Cannes. However, modesty here is conceptual. A small story of one family to a finale grows into a global metaphor - about how freedom leads to homelessness, how independence destroys a family. The solution to this equation does not exist in nature. Even then, in the comparatively patriarchal 1960, the search for a solution was only a cover-up, a disguise of the voids that had torn the soul into pieces to the most diligent average person.
Jerry (one of the best roles of Jake Gyllenhaal) is a quiet smiling man hiding growing despair under careful behavior. He had just been fired from a golf club, where he polished his shoes for rich clients and tried to forget about how he used to dream of a sports career. Jeanette (remarkable Carey Mulligan, criminally underestimated by cinema) is choking in the company of her introvert husband and wants to achieve at least some kind of independence; but she can only find a job as a swimming coach in a local pool. The town in Montana, where they had gone in the hope of a better life, is a real hole, a peaceful backwater, a death cover for any hope.
Moreover, what about Joe (talented 17-year-old Australian Ed Oxenbould, known for his role in The Visit? M. Night Shyamalan). He is not at all Holden Caulfield, he and the girls are not particularly interested. Joe is just watching. Moreover, it’s not for the sake of independence from ancestors to get a job at a local photo studio, but at least to cherish the dream of wholeness and beauty of a fictitious family idyll - one that does not exist in reality and which is often found on parade photographs.
An interesting detail of the film Dano: he attempts to get away from the elaborated patterns of the “novel of education” and to equalize the rights of the three main characters. Adults are as helpless and vulnerable to the device of society and the passage of time as a teenager is. When Joe makes this discovery, it cancels not only the necessity, but also the very possibility, it seemed, of a mandatory teenage riot. As Jerry is unable to extinguish a forest fire — only the snow that fell by November can cope with this — so he cannot set fire to the house of a successful rival. The very possibility of action is an illusion.
What remains? “Wildlife” unexpectedly lacks a sense of hopelessness and stalemate, although the plot seems to lead to this. Yes, and not from one plot, it develops: there are cold colors of the melancholic landscape caught in the lens by the operator Diego García (“Rak ti Khon Kaen”), there is shrill, but not sentimental music by David Lang (“Youth”). The bright elegiac mood of the film does not offer any morality, but it also does not devalue the futile (let us be honest) attempts by people to outsmart their own destiny. Jeanette specially takes out Joe from the city to the zone of forest fire in order to show him the wall of fire and chaos - a person cannot cope with this. In a teenager, this sight does not cause horror; he reconciles with him, as with the inevitability of growing up, separation and death. Moreover, as if he understands that the forest will be burning annually, according to the calendar. However, this is not a reason to refuse to extinguish the fire.
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