Review: "Wildlife"

“Wildlife” features some truly wonderful actors plying their craft at the highest of levels. And I didn’t believe a one of them for a cold minute.

This drama set in 1960 stars Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal as a youngish couple whose marriage is fracturing. Ed Oxenbould plays their sensitive 14-year-old son, Joe, who is forced to sit a front row seat to the slow, raucous dissolution. The film is based on the novel by Richard Ford, unread by me.

In stories of this kind we’re used to a lot of repressed emotions and raised voices behind closed doors. In the Hollywood view of this period, America was a cloistered place where people didn’t like to publicly air their dirty laundry. Things like marital estrangement and infidelity were swept under rugs.

Here, the film takes things so far to the opposite end it strains credulity to the breaking point, and beyond.

Not only do Jeanette and Jerry Brinson (Mulligan and Gyllenhaal, respectively) make no effort to hide their growing war from Joe, they actually enlist him as a participant. He sits in on their arguments and is explicitly asked to offer an opinion or take sides.

Later, the grotesquerie will grow even more overt, and less believable.

The Brinsons move around a lot because Jerry is always chasing the next big thing. He was recruited to be a golf pro at the club in Great Falls, Montana, but soon loses the job because he’s too “familiar” with the guests. (Read: he gambles with them.) They quickly offer to take him back, but Jerry’s pride is hurt and he refuses. Soon he’s doing little more than lounging on the couch, listening to ball games on the radio and sipping an endless parade of beers.

Jeanette is outwardly supportive of her husband’s lackadaisical job search. She even takes work herself as a swim instructor, and Joe gives up football to work in a photo studio afternoons after school to help make ends meet. 

That changes when Jerry agrees to take a job fighting the fires that seem to rage every year in the vast Montana forests. It will take him away from the family for weeks on end, which Jeanette views as a betrayal of sorts. She imagines him dallying with women, and uses that as justification for stepping out on her own.

The target of her amorous energy is an unlikely one: Warren Miller, a much older man played by Bill Camp. Balding, portly, bespectacled and walking with a pronounced limp, Warren isn’t much to look at. But he owns a car dealership, so Jeanette views him as a trade up from Jerry.

This is the directorial debut of Paul Dano, a very offbeat and good character actor, who also co-wrote the screenplay adaptation with actress Zoe Kazan (“The Big Sick”).

The biggest problem with “Wildlife” is never giving Joe any kind of distinct identity. His role is to just be there and witness the turmoil. Many stories use a character of this sort to be the audience’s lens to look at the real subjects, in this case Jerry and Jeanette.

But Joe isn’t even much of a real character. He doesn’t seem to have any interests, or motivations, or thoughts, or personality. There’s a girl who takes an obvious interest in him, but Joe sort of shrugs her off and the movie forgets about her.

There’s one scene in “Wildlife” that’s make-or-break. Jeanette puts on her “desperation dress” and takes Joe with her to have dinner at Warren’s house while Jerry is away. It’s an exquisitely awkward event. Mulligan skillfully shows us Jeanette’s obvious intention: to throw herself at Warren. For his part, Warren doesn’t appear disturbed about initiating the affair in her son’s presence, even offering fatherly advice.

I can’t for the life of me fathom people who would act like this. The problem isn’t that the film presents characters who are beyond comprehension; it’s that it doesn’t even attempt to explain these people to themselves.

Review: "The Visit"

Time turns on, whether we acknowledge it or no. In my mind M. Night Shyamalan is still the young wunderkind who dazzles us with dark, artful dodges of cinematic confection, the master of mind-rocking plot twists. He feints here, we look there, he wallops us backside of the head, and we are grateful.

Of course, Shyamalan's star has been falling almost since it first shone, his punches becoming more telegraphed and his storytelling frameworks ever more rickety. Alerted to the certainty of a surprise, audiences got better at sniffing them out beforehand.

People began to greet the arrival of his films not with anticipation but a sigh of awaited disappointment. His last two forays were into big-budget science fiction, a place where he knows the words but not the music, and the results spoke for themselves.

So here we are in the second week of September, filmdom's arid purgatory, and Shyamalan is back in his familiar territory of dread-filled mysteries with a supernatural bent. The setup is that two precocious teens are meeting their grandparents for the first time, staying a week at their remote Pennsylvania farm, and the oldsters turn out to be a bit strange, and then more than a bit.

It's an intriguing premise, and the actors playing the grandparents, Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie, are sly and scary, and even silly when called for. The kids aren't bad, Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould, though memories of Haley Joel Osment leave most child actors seeming a pale gossamer.

The movie's biggest failing is falling back on the now-moldy canard of "found footage." We're expected to believe that everything in the film was shot by the characters as they experienced it. It was a groundbreaking idea in 1999 when "The Blair Witch Project" first did it, subsequently copied endlessly, with more recent iterations including the "Paranormal Activity" series and "Unfriended."

Of course, the question at hand is always why the people keep filming themselves when they're being chased by a witch or chainsaw-wielding madman or whatever. Shyamalan's footage looks way too polished and high-definition to be the jittery recordings of teen amateurs, so the effect never really takes hold. It ends up seeming like a tacked-on gimmick.

Here, the 15-year-old, Becca (DeJonge), is a budding filmmaker who's making a documentary about meeting their grandparents, and also discovering what caused the terrible break between them and her mother (a vibrant Kathyry Hahn) years ago. The days are announced in title cards, with what we're seeing consisting of what was shot the day before as the girl edits it.

Becca's brother, Tyler (Oxenbould), is a 13-year-old wannabe rapper whose slams are mostly theoretical boasts about his finesse with girls and sports. In reality he's a bucktoothed loner who froze up during his last game in peewee football.

They all settle in for a nice week at Nana and Pop Pop's big country house, with the only rule being that the kids are not to leave their room after 9:30 at night. Of course they do, and observe grandma acting strangely, scampering about in her nightie (or less), moaning and vomiting. Grandpa explains that this is "sundowning," a common malady of the elderly in which they become agitated during the transition from day to night.

She also cooks a lot, and has the unfortunate habit of asking Becca to physically climb into the oven -- all the way, dear! -- to clean it. Could she be pinching their arms on the sly? "I have the deep darkies" is all she'll say.

Pop pop's got his own foibles. He seems preternaturally strong for a man over 70, heaving hay bales like Styrofoam packing. He avoids looking people in the eye, gets confused easily, accosts strangers he imagines are following him, and tells unnerving tales of glimpsing "a white thing with yellow eyes" in the factory, but nobody believed him.

Things go on from there, which obviously I'll not reveal. Here Shyamalan is consciously working against the audience's expectations, not trying to hide the fact a big twist is coming but keeping us guessing about what form it'll take.

"The Visit" is engaging enough as a mood piece, more about generating a pervading sense of dread than truly scaring us. If this is to be Shyamalan's last shot as a celebrity filmmaker, he could do worse.