Nature of things

Wildlife, actor Paul Dano’s debut as a feature film director, is a bittersweet domestic drama about the unraveling of a seemingly picture-perfect marriage, and the bewildering rite of passage it creates for the couple’s quietly resourceful (and increasingly resilient) teenage son.

The story is adapted from Richard Ford’s 1990 novel of the same name, and it has the special benefit of intriguingly nuanced performances by Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal (as the young parents, Jeanette and Jerry Brinson) and the low-key unpredictability in the characters played by relatively unknown actors (including especially young Ed Oxenbould as their son, Joe).

Part of what is particularly striking in Wildlife as a film is that so much is conveyed through pauses and silences and seemingly mundane activity. What the characters say and do, of course, counts for quite a lot, but Dano and company succeed in making unanswered questions, half-acknowledged contradictions, puzzled (and puzzling) emotions and tacitly mixed messages into vital parts of the action.

The basic plot has the peripatetic Brinsons trying to get settled in yet another new town—this time, it appears, in Great Falls, Mo. Jerry loses his job as a golf pro, has trouble finding another position locally, and eventually will leave town to join a firefighting crew. Jeanette finds work as a swimming instructor, and tries for other jobs as well. In the process, she starts a tentative romance with a wealthy widower (Bill Camp), and seems to be trying on different identities for size and effect.

Through most of this, Joe is the film’s point-of-view character. He’s kind of a misfit, an apparent loner, but a loner who pays close attention to the people around him, young and old alike, adult and otherwise. He’s deeply attached to both of his parents, even as they begin to neglect each other and Joe as well. And the attachment may be growing even deeper as he begins to find his own somewhat separate way forward.

Mulligan is very fine as a person whose various qualities seem as confounding to herself as they are to others, and especially to Joe. Gyllenhaal’s Jerry is a hauntingly subdued mixture of male pride and self-lacerating anger.

Oxenbould’s Joe, Camp’s wealthy widower, and Zoe Margaret Colletti (as Joe’s might-have-been girlfriend) all partake of an apparent ordinariness that, in Dano’s Wildlife, repeatedly catches us up with unexpected glints of genuine vitality.

Oxenbould, by the way, looks a little as if he might be a younger and smaller version of Dano himself. All that may be merely an accident of casting, but it adds yet another interesting tremor to the film’s reflections on the evolving shapes of lives and selves.