☆☆☆☆☆
From now on, when anyone asks what movie I think should have won Best Picture instead of Green Book, here is my answer: Wildlife, a movie that came and went from theaters in a couple of weeks, was overlooked in every major awards show, and that might be the best movie of 2018.
It's the directorial debut of actor Paul Dano, which he wrote with his partner, actress Zoe Kazan. To recite the narrative of Wildlife, which is based on a novel by Richard Ford, might make it seem trite and mundane, but I assure you it is anything but those things. Wildlife is told through the eyes of 14-year-old Joe (Ed Oxenbould, who is wise and wonderful), who watches, with both alarm and helplessness, his parents fall away from each other.
It's set in 1960, when men and women knew exactly what was expected of them. The trouble for Joe's family is that his father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), and his mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) don't want to live up to those expectations. Constantly jobless Jerry takes a job fighting a massive wildfire. While he's gone, normally stoic Jeanette has a breakdown -- or maybe it's an epiphany.
Mulligan's portrait of a woman losing herself is harrowing and filled with beautiful empathy. It's a luminous performance in a film that calmly, intimately observes the complicated, contradictory, awful, beautiful, confusing way people are, and the despair -- not to mention the hope -- that all that messiness can leave behind.
Viewed March 27, 2019 -- Amazon Prime
It's the directorial debut of actor Paul Dano, which he wrote with his partner, actress Zoe Kazan. To recite the narrative of Wildlife, which is based on a novel by Richard Ford, might make it seem trite and mundane, but I assure you it is anything but those things. Wildlife is told through the eyes of 14-year-old Joe (Ed Oxenbould, who is wise and wonderful), who watches, with both alarm and helplessness, his parents fall away from each other.
It's set in 1960, when men and women knew exactly what was expected of them. The trouble for Joe's family is that his father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), and his mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) don't want to live up to those expectations. Constantly jobless Jerry takes a job fighting a massive wildfire. While he's gone, normally stoic Jeanette has a breakdown -- or maybe it's an epiphany.
Mulligan's portrait of a woman losing herself is harrowing and filled with beautiful empathy. It's a luminous performance in a film that calmly, intimately observes the complicated, contradictory, awful, beautiful, confusing way people are, and the despair -- not to mention the hope -- that all that messiness can leave behind.
Viewed March 27, 2019 -- Amazon Prime
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