Wildlife

 

I drove home after work on a Friday and had that feeling. It wasn’t anything concrete, just enough to occupy my thoughts over the weekend. On Monday, moments after sitting at my desk to begin another work week, my boss approached with that look. When I picked up my 12-year-old daughter from swim practice that afternoon and she settled into my car, I said, “I don’t want you to worry about this, but…”

“You got laid-off,” she finished for me.

It’s surprising how perceptive our children can be – or how transparent we, as adults, can be while worrying over a weekend. My eight-year-old daughter wasn’t the least bit surprised by this latest development in her parents’ lives either.

In the meticulously controlled, observant, and deliciously subtle movie Wildlife, first time actor turned director Paul Dano takes us inside the experience of 14-year-old Joe as he observes his father Jerry and mother Jeanette. They’re a perfect little family of Js – although his mother hates her name. Joe is delighted as his father plays one-on-one football with him in the front yard. He’s comforted and reassured as he does his homework while watching his parents get affectionate in the kitchen.

And he’s more aware than his father – and ahead of his father – at grasping the meaning when his dad’s golf course manager boss takes his dad almost out of earshot saying, “This won’t take long.”

The wheels are quickly turning for young Joe. His father’s getting fired can’t and won’t be a good thing for the Js. Just how much not a good thing Joe only begins to realize when he comes home late after school one day to find his mom standing in the kitchen with that look and his dad on his haunches in the hallway with, well, that look as well. His dad has decided to run away from their Montana home to fight wildfires for $1 an hour. His mom is beside herself.

Joe kisses his father goodbye and watches him disappear in the back of a truck filled with other $1 per hour, recently recruited firefighters, and returns home to find his mom curled up in bed.

“Tomorrow, something will happen to make things feel different,” she says.

Carey Mulligan, as the reluctant J, Jeanette, gives one of the most nuanced and moment-to-moment lived-in performances I’ve ever seen. She does things with a simple glance as she hops out of a car that ripple with meaning for the remainder of the movie. And after a fade-out leaves her curled up on that bed to fade-in once again, tomorrow, to find her transformed into a 34-year-old woman game to do whatever she deems necessary to improve her situation – starting with an new and older man entering the picture – Joe finds himself with more than plenty to observe – and almost too much to figure out.

Wildlife is Joe’s coming of age story, but it’s not quite the one we’re briefly teased into expecting. A 14-year-old girl, Ruth, has an eye for him and the two begin a relationship: running together playfully through fields after school, her helping him cheat on a quiz based on some very thick novel he has been too distracted by his parents to read, and passing notes in class. But when that man enters his mom’s life, Joe’s troubles become too much to allow space for a budding teen romance. When Ruth slips him a note, asking to meet after school, he scribbles “can’t,” and bolts. The scene consumed me with sadness, but it’s the type of moment that accompanies growing up too early. You miss so much.

In a coda that I won’t describe, so as to avoid spoilers, Joe has completed his change. His role in the family has gone from supporting actor to director, much as Paul Dano has brilliantly done with his career.