‘Wildlife’ review — Paul Dano’s directoral debut is a career high for Carey Mulligan

Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife is a quiet but powerful tale of self-destruction with a masterful performance by Carey Mulligan.

Wildlife has all the workings of a classic kitchen sink drama. However, instead of the poor industrial towns of England, actor Paul Dano’s directorial debut moves the setting to 1960s Montana and follows a working-class family as they struggle through economic hardships.

However, Wildlife subverts the expectation of having a disenfranchised “angry young man” at the center of it. There is a man that fits that description in the story. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the patriarch of the family Jerry Brinson, a greenkeeper at a local country club who is fired because, according to him, he is “just too well liked.”

But he isn’t the center of the story. That would be his wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), a classic 60s housewife who is denied her full potential because that’s not what is in society’s expectations of her, and their 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who serves as our point-of-view for the film.

After losing his job, Jerry’s pride is clearly wounded. He came to Montana looking for quick success, but his dreams are quickly dashed away. That’s mostly because he thinks he is entitled to his dreams. “I thought it was that easy,” he says. 

Instead of demeaning himself by taking his old job back after they offer it to him, or any job in the town for that matter, he takes a job battling wildfires that are threatening the Canadian border. It’s dangerous and low-paying work, much to Jeanette’s dismay, but he’d rather face that than his failure. 

From there, we watch as Jeanette struggles through life horrified that her husband chose to nurse his pride rather than support his family. But this isn’t a story about a woman sulking and yearning after her brave husband away protecting them from the fires.

No, the screenplay, written by Dano and actress-writer Zoe Kazan (from last year’s The Big Sick), paint Jeanette as a real and complex woman who is abandoned by her husband without discussion or conversation. All the while, Joe is in the periphery absorbing what is happening—he’s not always understanding it, but always seeing it. 

The screenplay is quite a marvel and Dano, adept in his direction, knows how to extract the meaning out of every beat and line. Even the most unassuming lines have an impact. One of my favorites come after Jeanette goes to the local YMCA looking for a job, but being turned away after the secretary job she was applying for was no longer available. She briefly walks out of frame away from the woman working at the front desk, then comes back and says, “do you have any work for a man?” 

As one of my favorite movies of the year Annihilation puts forward, one destroys themselves so that they can become something new. Jeanette wears new clothes, drinks more heavily, and begins cozying herself up to a wealthy man named Warren (Bill Camp) all in front of her son. 

In the eyes of another director or writing pair, Jeanette might have been the villain. But in Wildlife, she isn’t necessarily the hero. She’s just a human dealing with life. That’s a lesson that Joe quickly has to learn as both of his parents deal with their troubles in drastic ways. 

Oxenbould has to tackle the challenging job of being an observer to the action without reacting to it in any over-the-top way and succeeds. Gyllenhaal does great work with what he has, as well—he’s not in the film as much as you’d expect.

However, this is Mulligan’s film. She tackles the web of emotions that Jeanette has to navigate with empathy and makes you understand her even when what she does doesn’t make sense. It’s an impressive triumph of a performance.

There are a few films that are made by their final shot and Wildlife is one of them. It’s no wonder that it is splashed on every poster for the film. And it emphasizes what makes the movie great. Dano relishes in the silences as much as he does in the dialogue. They both hold equal power.

In the final seconds after the last line of dialogue and we’re just looking at the characters, you can trace how that self-destruction has changed each of them, for better or worse.

Wildlife is playing in theaters in limited release.