Paul Dano, an actor know mostly for playing understated characters facing internal battles, turns the camera towards a crumbling family for Wildlife, his first turn as a director. Though a strong addition to the decaying-American-Dream genre, and an accomplished debut for Dano, Wildlife is often let down by muddled storytelling.
The film is centred around a family who have just arrived in small-town Montana in 1960, made up of 14-year-old Joe (Australian actor Ed Oxenbould) and his parents Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) and Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal). Each character is given a juicy arc as the family falls apart, but often it feels as though Dano is juggling too many threads, to the detriment of each.
Mulligan delivers the film's best performance; it is through Jeanette's eyes that we understand how the sanitised nuclear family ideologies of the 1950s failed women like her. Every time the film loses momentum completely, Mulligan pulls viewers back in with a quivering lip or her disarmingly sad eyes.
A nearby wildfire cleverly offers the central metaphor; what happens to animals when their world goes up in flames? Throughout Wildlife, there are times when it's hard to know what Dano's answer to that is. But as the devastating closing moments confirm, Wildlife's characters don't know the answer either, and this is where Dano succeeds. The American Dream has failed this family, and they're left stumbling, blind, into their uncharted futures.
