The 2018 New York Film Festival was opened by "Wild Life", and it is a good choice to watch it now. Last year, I watched "Florida Paradise" at this time. Due to the high expectations, I was a little disappointed when I admitted that I was amazed after watching it. This year, Paul Dano's directorial debut is just the opposite. After adjusting his expectations appropriately, he feels that it is a rather comfortable film. "No obvious flaws and failures" is a more appropriate evaluation of this film.
The film adaptation of Richard Ford's novel of the same name focuses on the postwar America of the 1960s, a period that is not uncommon for films depicting this period. Julianne Moore in. The "Wild West" Montana in the movie, although it looks quiet and peaceful, is actually turbulent - it's not how chaotic the social level is, but everyone's heart is always tethered to this or that struggle.
In my opinion, Dano's greatest strength as a director is that he portrays this invisible weight with characters and images rather than plot. The pressure of work, the pressure of maintaining family stability, the pressure of adapting to a new environment and growth, and the pressure of chasing freedom, etc., we all read it in the eyes of the three protagonists without reservation. In the seemingly ordinary life, each of them seems to be bound by an invisible rope, and their hearts will explode or collapse at any time. The rhythm of the movie is not strong, and the only thing that really lifts the heartstrings is the part near the end of my father's "burning the house". I think this should be the director's intention. The narrative rhythm deliberately suppressed in "Wild Life" is more to shape and lay out the subtle waves in the hearts of the three characters.
Of course, what this brings is that the overall film is slightly dull, the story lacks surprise, and all plot developments are embarrassingly in a "well-designed expectation", the film is smooth and natural, but not free and easy. Paul Dano still lacks some "authority". Although it is valuable that he does not show off any tricks, it is still slightly different from some movies of the same type. For example, narrating from the perspective of a child is slightly lacking in that it does not incorporate too many children's own feelings, and the level of detail is not as good as last year's "Pete on the Horse" by Andrew Haigh. In this film, the little boy Joe takes on more of the role of explaining the story. The subjectivity of the characters is not strong. What we see is mostly the "reflection" of specific events on him, not really from his vision. to deconstruct the world around you.
We can naturally say that the director's original intention was exactly this, and Paul Dano didn't want a "story told by a little boy" to become a "story of a boy growing up". "Wild Life" is a neat work, with almost no edges and corners, and one of the factors is the delicate balance propped up between the three characters - everyone has enough scene, but not robbing each other. . The father played by Jake Gyllenhaal is the one with the least appearance among the three, so his scenes are all "concentrated", so even with "a few strokes" we can fully perceive the ins and outs of this role. Kelly Mulligan propped up the entire movie in most of the pages of her father's "running away", using facial expressions to present the characters, so although it occupies the space, it does not give people a sense of disobedience of excessive "drama" . Perhaps it was the background of the actor that made Dano pay special attention to the performance of the leading role in the film, but this balance also caused the lack of tension in the film. Aside from the intentional rhythm, the interpretation of the characters in the film is obviously not similar. The theme of "Manchester by the Sea" is spicy and sophisticated.
Nonetheless, I still really like this movie. There are times when "no ambition" seems like the best start to realizing one's own ambitions. Paul Dano may not be as gifted as some of the other directors, but within "what he can", he tells us a family story that can easily fall into place if we're not careful. In "Wild Life", I am glad to see that film as art does not need to be defined by "a flash of inspiration", just like the characters in the film, most of the time the true meaning of life stays in those humble and ordinary .
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