Review: Paul Dano’s directorial debut ‘Wildlife’ is an instant classic

Wildlife focuses on a struggling family in 1960 and is mainly from the perspective of the 14-year-old son, Joe, played by Australian actor, Ed Oxenbould. At the post-screening Q&A with the director, Paul Dano admits that he only shot in digital because he was worried they’d have to do a lot of takes with a young actor. Turns out, Oxenbould was quite perfect from the first take. I would not have guessed digital as the color and tone was quite rich and retro.

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With no previews, the film started and I was instantly struck by how the camera didn’t move with the action and often dialogue took place off-screen. The film begins with mother, father, and son in the same shot at the kitchen table and slowly erodes throughout the film to only show close-ups with the characters, rarely showing them together. Once you see it, it becomes so obvious. Art imitating life. It’s brilliant.

Carey Mulligan is somehow old and young, frustrating and empathetic. It’s mind-boggling that she’s old enough to have a 14-year-old. Her character does the most outlandish things yet the audience somehow forgives her. While he doesn’t have as many scenes as Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal gives a desperate and hopeful performance as the father. However, the most expressive and stoic performance comes from the young Ed Oxenbould.

After this tragic yep hopeful film, Film Comment put on a free talk with writer/director Paul Dano and the author of the novel on which it was based, Richard Ford. It’s a very interesting talk, as you discover that Richard Ford did not want Paul Dano to make a scene-for-scene recreation of his novel, he wanted him to take inspiration and make it his own.

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8 New York Film Festival films you can see this year & 3 are coming to Netflix!

The festival is officially over, but you’ll be able to see a few of the selections very soon!

Private Life
Country: USA
In Tamara Jenkins’s first film in ten years, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are achingly real as Rachel and Richard, a middle-aged New York couple caught in the desperation, frustration, and exhaustion of trying to have a child, whether by fertility treatments or adoption or surrogate motherhood. They find a willing partner in Sadie (the formidable Kayli Carter), Richard’s niece by marriage, who happily agrees to donate her eggs, and the three of them build their own little outcast family in the process. Private Life is a wonder, by turns hilarious and harrowing (sometimes at once), and a very carefully observed portrait of middle-class Bohemian Manhattanites. With John Carroll Lynch and Molly Shannon.
Distributed by: Netflix WATCH NOW


Wildlife
Country: USA
In the impressive directorial debut from actor Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), a carefully wrought adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1990 novel, a family comes apart one loosely stitched seam at a time. We are in the lonely expanses of the American west in the mid-’60s. An affable man (Jake Gyllenhaal), down on his luck, runs off to fight the wildfires raging in the mountains. His wife (Carey Mulligan) strikes out blindly in search of security and finds herself running amok. It is left to their young adolescent son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) to hold the center. Co-written by Zoe Kazan, Wildlife is made with a sensitivity and at a level of craft that are increasingly rare in movies.
Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival
Awards: Golden Camera – Cannes Film Festival (Nominee), Grand Jury Prize – Sundance Film Festival (Nominee), People’s Choice Award – Toronto International Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: IFC Films 10/19/2018

Melissa says: I’ll see anything with Paul Dano because he always brings incredible sincerity to his characters. I’m very curious to see how that sincerity translates behind the camera.


Burning
Country: South Korea
Expanded from Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning,” the sixth feature from Korean master Lee Chang-dong, known best in the U.S. for such searing, emotional dramas as Secret Sunshine (NYFF45) and Poetry (NYFF48), begins by tracing a romantic triangle of sorts: Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring writer, becomes involved with a woman he knew from childhood, Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), who is about to embark on a trip to Africa. She returns some weeks later with a fellow Korean, the Gatsby-esque Ben (Steven Yeun), who has a mysterious source of income and a very unusual hobby. A tense, haunting multiple-character study, the film accumulates a series of unanswered questions and unspoken motivations to conjure a totalizing mood of uncertainty and quietly bends the contours of the thriller genre to brilliant effect.
Cannes Film Festival, Munich Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival
Awards: FIPRESCI Prize – Cannes Film Festival (Winner), Vulcain Prize for the Technical Artist – Cannes Film Festival (Winner), Palme d’Or – Cannes Film Festival (Nominee), ARRI/OSRAM Award – Munich Film Festival (Nominee), People’s Choice Award – Toronto International Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: Well Go USA 10/26/2018

Melissa says: I’ve been continually impressed with South Korean cinema, so there’s no reason to think this will be anything less than amazing.


At Eternity’s Gate
North American Premiere
Country: USA, France
Julian Schnabel’s ravishingly tactile and luminous new film takes a fresh look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh, and in the process revivifies our sense of the artist as a living, feeling human being. Schnabel; his co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg, also the film’s editor; and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme strip everything down to essentials, fusing the sensual, the emotional, and the spiritual. And the pulsing heart of At Eternity’s Gate is Willem Dafoe’s shattering performance: his Vincent is at once lucid, mad, brilliant, helpless, defeated, and, finally, triumphant. With Oscar Isaac as Gauguin, Rupert Friend as Theo, Mathieu Amalric as Dr. Gachet, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, and Mads Mikkelsen as The Priest.
Venice Film Festival
Awards: Best Film – Venice Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: CBS Films 11/16/2018

Melissa says: If nothing less, Willem Dafoe will be worth watching.


The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
North American Premiere
Country: USA
Here’s something new from the Coen Brothers—an anthology of short films based on a fictional book of “western tales,” featuring Tim Blake Nelson as a murderous, white-hatted singing cowboy; James Franco as a bad luck bank-robber; Liam Neeson as the impresario of a traveling medicine show with increasingly diminishing returns, where they use the best equipment for travelling as the PNW backpack; Tom Waits as a die-hard gold prospector; Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck as two shy people who almost come together on the wagon trail; and Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek, Brendan Gleeson, Chelcie Ross, and Jonjo O’Neill as a motley crew on a stagecoach to nowhere. Each story is distinct but unified by the thematic thread of mortality. As a whole movie experience, Buster Scruggs is wildly entertaining, and, like all Coen films, endlessly surprising.
Venice Film Festival
Awards: Best Film – Venice Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: Netflix, Annapurna Production 11/16/2018

Melissa says: This trailer reminds me of the one for A Serious Man, so let’s hope it’s as good.


Shoplifters
Country: Japan
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is a heartrending glimpse into an often invisible segment of Japanese society: those struggling to stay afloat in the face of crushing poverty. On the margins of Tokyo, a most unusual “family”—a collection of societal castoffs united by their shared outsiderhood and fierce loyalty to one another—survives by petty stealing and grifting. When they welcome into their fold a young girl who’s been abused by her parents, they risk exposing themselves to the authorities and upending their tenuous, below-the-radar existence. The director’s latest masterful, richly observed human drama makes the quietly radical case that it is love—not blood—that defines a family.
Cannes Film FestivalMunich Film FestivalToronto International Film Festival
Awards: Palme d’Or – Cannes Film Festival (Winner), Best International Film – Munich Film Festival (Winner), People’s Choice Award – Toronto International Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: Magnolia Pictures 11/23/2018


The Favourite
Country: USA, Ireland, UK
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s wildly intricate and very darkly funny new film, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), and her servant Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) engage in a sexually charged fight to the death for the body and soul of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession. This trio of truly brilliant performances is the dynamo that powers Lanthimos’s top-to-bottom reimagining of the costume epic, in which the visual pageantry of court life in 18th-century England becomes not just a lushly appointed backdrop but an ironically heightened counterpoint to the primal conflict unreeling behind closed doors.
Venice Film Festival
Awards: Best Film – Venice Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures 11/23/2018


ROMA
Country: Mexico, USA
In Alfonso Cuarón’s autobiographically inspired film, set in Mexico City in the early ’70s, we are placed within the physical and emotional terrain of a middle-class family whose center is quietly and unassumingly held by its beloved live-in nanny and housekeeper (Yalitza Aparicio). The cast is uniformly magnificent, but the real star of ROMA is the world itself, fully present and vibrantly alive, from sudden life-changing events to the slightest shifts in mood and atmosphere. Cuarón tells us an epic story of everyday life while also gently sweeping us into a vast cinematic experience, in which time and space breathe and majestically unfold. Shot in breathtaking black and white and featuring a sound design that represents something new in the medium, ROMA is a truly visionary work.
Toronto International Film Festival, Venice Film Festival
Awards: People’s Choice Award – Toronto International Film Festival (Nominee), Best Film – Venice Film Festival (Nominee)
Distributed by: Netflix 12/14/2018

Melissa says: The director of Children of Men and Gravity, two incredibly cinematic creations, does a black and white family drama. Oh, I’m all in.