Kritiken

Wildlife is ostensibly about the break-up of a marriage, but really it’s about the end of childhood... The film builds quietly and carefully as a study of beleaguered masculinity, and then, with Jerry gone, abruptly shifts focus.

If ‘Wildlife’ can feel like a play at times, its stifling confines and claustrophobic mood are deliberate. It definitely doesn’t look like one – Diego Garcia’s lush, nostalgic cinematography exudes romance, albeit of the doomed kind – and Dano avoids melodrama, drenching it in atmosphere.

If Wildlife is anything to go by, Paul Dano might be a case of an actor successfully transitioning to director without any trace of self-indulgence. His debut feature... is an engrossing portrait of familial fracture in 1960s Montana, with a remarkable performance from the incomparable Carey Mulligan.

A beautifully observed study of an American family coming apart at the seams, it not only establishes Dano as a director to watch, but features an extraordinary performance by Mulligan.

Dano, who wrote the script with Zoe Kazan, tries to compensate for the familiarity of the material with emotionally precise performances and exacting compositions that reflect the characters’ upright behavior, but there’s no shaking the feeling that this sort of study of all-American repression has been done to death.

Dano’s direction is meticulous in every respect, which enables him to keep the characters at a remove that is both cleareyed and compassionate. The sharp cinematography by Diego Garcia is ideal for Dano’s purpose. The whole of the film is a potent collaboration in every respect, and a remarkable directorial debut.

With patient pacing and expressive, measured use of close-ups, Dano masterfully registers the shifts in the Brinsons’ identities.

There are a few times that Dano tries too hard: an odd angle he doesn’t need, a too-self-conscious evocation of the American past. But he gets everything that matters right. He gives his actors space so that the rhythms are their own, and they hold us through the tough final scenes and bittersweet ending. This is a superb film.

Dano’s attentiveness subverts a common stereotype about actors-turned-directors, namely that they indulge their performers at the expense of visual style and mise-en-scène, the building blocks of film language. Though it boasts enough scenes to furnish half a dozen decent Oscar clip reels, “Wildlife” disperses its attention evenly between background and foreground.

Wildlife leaves you deeply moved with a vital take on a woman who stops tamping down her feelings and forges a new identity out of the ashes of her past.

Adapted from Richard Ford’s novel of the same name, Wildlife is a confident and compassionate first film. But with its protagonist mostly relegated to waiting and observing, its main raison d’être is Mulligan’s masterful turn...

By the end, it’s easy to imagine how a less-exacting filmmaker might have coasted on our comfortably smug distaste for the era’s gender restrictiveness, and created something more arch and safely judgmental. But that isn’t “Wildlife,” which in the hands of its filmmakers and cast is a rivetingly good, human journey, full of sparks, flame, smoke, containment, ash, and the terrible beauty that sometimes mystifyingly colors stories of desolation.