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Catch fire

A quartet of fine performances help to make Paul Dano’s directorial debut a total win with Wildlife. The movie, about a family falling apart in the early ’60, is a sometimes uncomfortable experience. Considering the subject matter, it’s supposed to be.

Young Joe (Ed Oxenbould) is living a typical early ’60s life in Montana. Mom Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) stays at home while dad Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) works a low-paying job at the local country club. Jerry urges Joe to try out for football, while Jeanette helps him with his studies. It’s not an ideal life—money clearly could become an issue if life takes a wrong turn.

When Jerry loses his job, a family meltdown rapidly ensues. Jerry becomes despondent, while Jeanette takes a job teaching swimming. Joe gets a part-time gig at a photography shop taking pictures, as dad spirals further into depression.

When Jerry announces that he will join a firefighting team, with virtually no firefighting experience, Jeanette doesn’t take the news well. Jerry takes off into the mountains of Montana for low pay and high risk, while Jeanette and Joe fend for themselves back home. Jeanette accuses Jerry of escaping their problems and basically abandoning his wife and son. Jerry sees it as a more reputable and manly way to make money than shining a golfer’s shoes at a country club.

So the stage is set for what amounts to the best performance of Mulligan’s career as Jeanette shows signs of major insecurities and mental health issues. Jerry shows the very same signs, and Gyllenhaal is also amazing here. Their synchronized unraveling is almost proof that they were meant to be together. As Jeanette’s behavior becomes erratic and Jerry digs fire trenches in the mountains, Joe seems to be the only one in his family acting like an adult.

Dano, who co-wrote the script with his extremely talented partner, Zoe Kazan, does a beautiful and sometimes scary job of framing this picture through the eyes of Joe. We see the love for their son clearly emanating from both Jerry and Jeanette, even as their behavior ranges from pathetic to despicable. It’s the little things, like Jerry throwing a football to his boy, and mom solving a math problem for her son, that establish the undeniable family love. The couple is very likeable, even as they go off the rails.

Bill Camp, the final member of the performance quartet, is extremely effective as local businessman Warren Miller—no relation to the ski film guy—who Jeanette turns to while Jerry is away. He seems to be a decent enough guy, talking poetry with Jeanette in her living room and talking up Joe, even suggesting he’ll give Jerry a job when he comes back from the mountains. But it isn’t too long before Joe spies Warren’s naked ass through the crack of a door, signifying that Joe’s parents’ marriage is officially in dire trouble.

One of the best scenes in the film involves Jeanette driving Joe to the area where Jerry is fighting fires, before things really begin to fall apart. Jeanette tells Joe to step out of the car to take a look. We just see Joe’s face as he stares uncomfortably at the fire, as if he’s observing his family’s oncoming horrors. The shot is followed by an actual view of the mountainside as it is rapidly consumed by flames. It’s a beautifully filmed moment.

All of these performers have great faces. Gyllenhaal says so much with a glare. There’s so much fear and uncertainty behind Mulligan’s smile. Camp’s gentle expressions somehow denote a certain villainy. Oxenbould’s eyes just scream, “Adolescence is kicking my ass.”

Mulligan is most definitely in the hunt for Best Actress, while Gyllenhaal is having a fine year in supporting roles such as this and The Sisters Brothers. Oxenbould is definitely somebody to keep watching, as is Dano in directorial mode. Wildlife is loaded with talent put to good use. Ω

“Nothing funny about wildfires.”

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1Bohemian Rhapsody Rami Malek gives it his all as Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer of Queen, in the new biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. That, and a competent recreation of Queen’s Live Aid domination, are just about the only good things you can say about this mostly embarrassing effort to memorialize an incredible person and his sadly short life. The movie basically takes Mercury’s legacy, completely screws with his life’s timeline and makes up a bunch of unnecessary events to pad its 135-minute running time. So much of this film isn’t true, and the fact that they took this hard-living rock star’s life and homogenized it for a PG-13 film doesn’t help make it feel anything close to authentic. Mercury died from pneumonia while battling AIDS in 1991. He wasn’t diagnosed with the illness until 1987. This film, partially directed by Bryan Singer and then finished by Dexter Fletcher, has Mercury learning of his diagnosis before his incredible 1985 Live Aid performance, even telling the band of his illness shortly before they went on stage. This is complete bullshit and a total injustice to Mercury and his band’s legacy. Malek, acting through a big set of fake teeth made to capture the look of Mercury’s four extra incisors, is decent in the role. He actually sang on set, his voice blended with a Mercury soundalike to keep the movie from being a completely lip-synched affair. The musical sequences, including the Live Aid gig, are fun to watch. But, hey, if I want good Queen music, I can just watch the videos of Queen. There’s a movie happening between those musical sequences, and that movie is terrible, a messed-up bit of fakery that prompts a lot of unintentional laughter. There’s a great, truthful movie to be made about the life of Freddie Mercury. Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t even come close to being that movie.

4Mid90s Jonah Hill makes his feature directing debut from his own script with Mid90s, the best movie ever made about skater culture and a powerful movie about familial dysfunction and the need for friendships. Sunny Suljic (The House with a Clock in Its Walls) gives a breakout performance as Stevie, a kid living in a single parent household with a headcase older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges). Stevie suffers massive beatings at the hands of Ian and goes to a messed-up place where he causes himself further pain with self-inflicted strangulation, skin burns and simply pressing on the bruises Ian created. In short, the kid has some major issues. In search of some kind of identity, Stevie grabs himself a skateboard and starts hanging around some older kids at the skate shop. As Stevie’s social life takes off, his home life further withers, including increasing violence from Ian and some communication problems with his mother, Dabney (Katherine Waterston of Alien: Covenant). The director doesn’t shy away from the bad influence some of them provide—influences present in just about every high schooler’s life. Suljic, a solid young actor, proves to be the perfect pick for Stevie. 2 Overlord American soldiers get personal with some mutant Nazi soldiers in Overlord, one of the weirder films to make it to the big screen in 2018. U.S. World War II paratroopers, led by Kurt Russell’s look-and-sound-alike son Wyatt as demolition expert Ford, land in a Nazi-occupied French town. It’s the eve of D-Day, and the beginning of director Julius Avery’s flick is an effective war movie as those paratroopers, including Jovan Adepo as Boyce and John Magaro as Tibbet, must escape a crashing plane and then evade Nazis on the ground. Soon after linking up with local resident Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), the soldiers find themselves in a safehouse. It’s a typical small French town house, excepting for the fact that Chloe’s aunt down the hall is ill, and we aren’t talking whooping cough. Nazi doctors are seriously screwing with dead people’s biochemistry. This results in some messed-up experiments like Chloe’s aunt, but also brings about superhuman Nazi soldier zombies with direct orders to tear people apart. Yikes! The whole Nazi zombie thing has been done before, but never with such authentic style and gory aplomb. At a time when studios are starting to release their Oscar favorites, it’s interesting to see something like Overlord post-Halloween. The movie doesn’t score major points for originality, but it’s a good time nonetheless for those of us who enjoy seeing bad things done to Nazi types.

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2Venom This is a sometimes entertaining mess, but it’s still a mess. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: you shouldn’t have a Venom movie without Spider-Man playing into the comic villain’s backstory, somehow. This film has no Spidey. Tom Hardy labors hard at playing Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter who’s infected by the symbiote and starts biting off people’s heads in PG-13 fashion. Brock winds up with Venom’s voice in his head and an ability to make Venom sort of a good/bad guy. It’s all kind of stupid, playing things mostly for laughs and squandering a chance for a real horror show. Hardy gives it his all, but the film feels like a botch job pretty much from the start. Michelle Williams gets what might be the worst role of her career as Brock’s girlfriend, and Riz Ahmed plays the stereotypical villain. There are hints of something cool, but they are buried under a pile of muck.