Wildlife

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source: Wildlife

When creating a family drama film, it's one thing to have all the correct pieces to make the emotion work. "Wildlife" does that. It's another thing, however, to make all those pieces really mean something the move the emotions of the audience. "Wildlife" fails in this key task, rendering it an ultimately poor experience. For a basic plot summary, this film tells the story centers on a family in 1960s Montana. Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to find work around town and volunteers to fight fires instead. While he is away, wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) has something of a mid-life crisis of her own, conducting an affair with town car salesman Warren (Bill Camp). Caught in the middle of this is son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who at 14 is just trying to figure out whether or not he likes football and navigating a female friendship. One major positive I can say about "Wildlife" is that it contains some solid acting performances, paramount being that of young Oxenbould. Though his character isn't given much room to emote (a sad fault of the script), he seems to be "in the middle" of nearly every key scene. Gyllenhaal is never a letdown, as per the usual, and Mulligan (like Oxenbould) does the best with the material given her. The main problem here, however, is that the viewer never really gets a sense of what the film is supposed to be about. At the outset, it looks to center on Jerry but then he leaves for quite some time. The focus then shifts to Jeanette, whose personality change as soon as her husband leaves is almost too jarring to be believable (or at very least needed some more reasoning behind it). Finally, there are times when the film really seems like it might just be all about Joe, yet none of his life outside his relationship to his parents is given any shrift or importance at all besides nominally establishing his age and adolescence. So, while watching "Wildlife", I never really felt like I knew what was trying to be conveyed. This made the emotion it tries to inflict more of a glance blow than an arrow to the heart. The sparseness of the rest of the production (stable camera shots, very little music presence) does not help the cause. I was never outrightly bored while watching, but never even close to "fully invested" either.

'Wildlife (2018)' is well made in every way, with its fantastic performances combining with its restrained but assured direction and solid but somewhat unremarkable script to paint a realistic portrait of a failing family seen through the slightly immature yet more world-weary than he's given credit for young lead. The piece isn't necessarily all that powerful, though, and is, sadly, pretty unmemorable, to boot. It's a bit of a strange case because I was invested in the story, characters and overall world right from the off, always involved in its twists and turns and feeling as though I was participating in its narrative (in the sense that I wasn't spoon-fed everything), but I literally forgot I had even seen the feature not two hours after getting home from the cinema, only remembering after being reminded what it was I'd just watched, which doesn't bode well for its overall lasting impact. It also marks it, perhaps, as an experience more adept at setting up a confident new directorial talent than anything else, one rife with opportunity for its actors to impressively stretch their 'acting muscles' and for its plot to portray a more nuanced view of its core players than we usually see in typical 'Hollywood' fare. Of course, your mileage will vary depending on how much it connects with you, and I'd easily recommended giving it a watch at least once. 6/10.

Horrible, horrible, horrible movie. I'm a huge Jake Gyllenhaal fan. He's the sole reason I watched this drivel. It was slow and excruciating to sit through. The actor who played the son was just annoying to watch. The wife/mother was an awful, cold, self-absorbed, witch (with a capital B.) I hated her character so much. I wanted to turn the movie off halfway through. I only suffered through to the end to see Gyllenhaal come back from fighting the fire and see what he did when he found out what'd been happening while he was away. His performance is the only reason I even gave this piece of crap film two stars.

This movie did not deserve the 7.2 rating it received. Although the acting was good, It was very depressing, boring and I would not recommend this movie to anyone. It was a waste of two hours of my life! Don't waste your time people. It lacked substance and credibility. Such a let down. Seriously crap!

Paul Dano, Richard Ford,Carey Mulligan....what a trifecta. Toss in Ed Oxenbould & Jake Gyllenhaal....delicious. That Oxenbould is someone to watch & Dano knows. Of course I own all of Richard Fords books and met him at the Sydney Book Festival some years back. Those ice blue eyes and switched on intellect just like Paul Dano. So happy someone is brave enough to tackle Ford just as Robert Altman embraced Raymond Carver. As soon as I learned this was Danos debut it was a must see. It had limited release in Sydney so travelled quite a distance to a cinema in an area I'd never visited. Its a big city. Five strangers were waiting to go in. I asked one if they knew the area postcode & everyone laughed as we'd all left our comfort zones for Danos debut movie and had no idea. Visually gorgeous, script & pacing smoooooth as......faultless acting & someone directing who respects other artists, understands complex emotions & embraces what makes a memorable, enduring movie. Pure class. Where would we be without such wonderful creatives. Thank you everybody.....and yes I did find my way home.

I very much enjoyed watching Wildlife. Whether it was a Directorial Debut or a director's tenth film, I found it to be superb, which I suppose speaks of the talent of Paul Dano. (Did anyone else feel there is some resemblance between the actor who played Joe and Paul? Just an aside...) The film, as other reviewers have mentioned, has a restraint to it which works well and stops it from descending into overdone pathos. In its strong quiet way it brought up emotions in me which made it a compelling film to watch. I was very involved with the experience of each character. They each were realistic with very realistic concerns. I would say that perhaps the overriding emotion I felt was anger at the parents because they each gave in to their selfish needs and wants, while leaving their 14 year old son to be the mature one. What does "mature" mean here? It means doing what's right, as in the Buddhist "right action." Jeanette, the mother, did things that made her feel good; she gave in to her own egotistic wounds and tried to fix them, at her son's expense. Likewise, Jerry, the father, did too. He drank, he gave up a job out of pride, and he ultimately pursued an adventure, also rather than do what would have been more responsible, and also, more dull. Joe, the son, was the one who was focused on the three of them as a family, as captured in the final shot of the film, symbolic as it was. One could say the theme of Wildlife was Family vs. the Individual, i.e., how much can adults sacrifice of their own desires and ambitions in the name of the family unit and/or the children? By extension, it can also be asked how is it possible, assuming it is, to satisfy both. Ironically, the teenage Joe enabled his parents to respectively pursue their own desires while he maintained the family unit. I'd wholeheartedly recommend this multi-faceted film to anyone who prefers depth to flash.

Extremely slow and boring. It was like watching paint dry.