WILDLIFE

Paul Dano is one of the best actors in the world today though not too many people seem to recognize the fact, or maybe it's just the Academy since Dano has yet to be Oscar-nominated for any of the extraordinary performances he has given. Now he's turned his hand to directing and with "Wildlife" he has made one of the best directorial debuts in American cinema. I haven't read the Richard Ford novel that he and his partner Zoe Kazan have adapted for the screen but I honestly believe Dano's film version is as fine as movies can get.

Fundamentally, there are really only four characters. Jerry Brinson, (Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Jeanette, (Carey Mulligan), their 14-year-old son Joe, (Ed Oxenbould), and the middle-aged man, (Bill Camp), the wife meets after Jerry 'deserts' his family to go and fight wildfires, (the setting is a picturesque but lonely looking Montana). The period is 1960, beautifully evoked in the settings, the costumes and even in the language the characters speak, while the film is about a marriage that is neither happy nor unhappy and with characters who are just making do, (the 14-year-old son is the most mature character on screen).

It is a deeply sad and pensive film; there are times I was reminded of Bergman but it certainly doesn't feel like a rip-off or even a homage. Dano handles individual scenes magnificently. There is a lengthy sequence where the mother and son are invited for dinner to the home of the man the mother has met that is a master-class in what, I suppose, you could call the cinema of embarrassment. The mother gets drunk and flirts, the man makes a pass at her and the boy is shocked and then it ends almost as suddenly as it began. It is a scene reminiscent of real-life and not of what we are used to seeing at the movies.

The whole film is beautifully acted. Perhaps it is Dano's brilliance as an actor that enables him to draw performances of this quality from his players. Gyllenhaal may have the smallest part, (he's absent for much of the film's middle section), but he's perfectly cast. Bill Camp has finally got a part worthy of his talent but it is Mulligan and young Oxenbould who carry the film. Oxenbould is astonishingly good as the boy trying to live a normal life in what is really an abnormal situation and Mulligan has probably never been better than as a woman who married too young and is now regretting it. Near the end, it threatens it dip into melodrama but it doesn't. As in life, things don't go quite the way you anticipate and like life, you just get on with it. "Wildlife" is a great film and was totally ignored by the Academy last year; once again I say, shame on them.