When creating a family drama film, it's one thing to have all the correct pieces to make the emotion work. "Wildlife" does that. It's another thing, however, to make all those pieces really mean something the move the emotions of the audience. "Wildlife" fails in this key task, rendering it an ultimately poor experience.
For a basic plot summary, this film tells the story centers on a family in 1960s Montana. Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to find work around town and volunteers to fight fires instead. While he is away, wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) has something of a mid-life crisis of her own, conducting an affair with town car salesman Warren (Bill Camp). Caught in the middle of this is son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who at 14 is just trying to figure out whether or not he likes football and navigating a female friendship.
One major positive I can say about "Wildlife" is that it contains some solid acting performances, paramount being that of young Oxenbould. Though his character isn't given much room to emote (a sad fault of the script), he seems to be "in the middle" of nearly every key scene. Gyllenhaal is never a letdown, as per the usual, and Mulligan (like Oxenbould) does the best with the material given her.
The main problem here, however, is that the viewer never really gets a sense of what the film is supposed to be about. At the outset, it looks to center on Jerry but then he leaves for quite some time. The focus then shifts to Jeanette, whose personality change as soon as her husband leaves is almost too jarring to be believable (or at very least needed some more reasoning behind it). Finally, there are times when the film really seems like it might just be all about Joe, yet none of his life outside his relationship to his parents is given any shrift or importance at all besides nominally establishing his age and adolescence.
So, while watching "Wildlife", I never really felt like I knew what was trying to be conveyed. This made the emotion it tries to inflict more of a glance blow than an arrow to the heart. The sparseness of the rest of the production (stable camera shots, very little music presence) does not help the cause. I was never outrightly bored while watching, but never even close to "fully invested" either.
For a basic plot summary, this film tells the story centers on a family in 1960s Montana. Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to find work around town and volunteers to fight fires instead. While he is away, wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) has something of a mid-life crisis of her own, conducting an affair with town car salesman Warren (Bill Camp). Caught in the middle of this is son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who at 14 is just trying to figure out whether or not he likes football and navigating a female friendship.
One major positive I can say about "Wildlife" is that it contains some solid acting performances, paramount being that of young Oxenbould. Though his character isn't given much room to emote (a sad fault of the script), he seems to be "in the middle" of nearly every key scene. Gyllenhaal is never a letdown, as per the usual, and Mulligan (like Oxenbould) does the best with the material given her.
The main problem here, however, is that the viewer never really gets a sense of what the film is supposed to be about. At the outset, it looks to center on Jerry but then he leaves for quite some time. The focus then shifts to Jeanette, whose personality change as soon as her husband leaves is almost too jarring to be believable (or at very least needed some more reasoning behind it). Finally, there are times when the film really seems like it might just be all about Joe, yet none of his life outside his relationship to his parents is given any shrift or importance at all besides nominally establishing his age and adolescence.
So, while watching "Wildlife", I never really felt like I knew what was trying to be conveyed. This made the emotion it tries to inflict more of a glance blow than an arrow to the heart. The sparseness of the rest of the production (stable camera shots, very little music presence) does not help the cause. I was never outrightly bored while watching, but never even close to "fully invested" either.