Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Wildlife (2018)

Jack and I didn't love this Spirit Award nominated movie about an unhappy 1950's couple from the point of view of their teenage son, even though we agreed that Carey Mulligan's (last blogged for Mudbound) performance is noteworthy and the cinematography is beautiful. It's just that their discord and, especially, bad parenting bothered us. When those things are shown with humor we're almost always fine with it, but there are no intentional laughs in this picture. Jake Gyllenhaal (most recently in these pages for Okja) is reliably good as the husband and so is Ed Oxenbould as their son.

Paul Dano, making his directing debut, co-wrote the script with his domestic partner Zoe Kazan (most recently in these pages for writing Ruby Sparks, her screenwriting debut), adapted from the 1990 novel by Richard Ford.

I can't find online the soundtrack by composer David Lang (he scored Youth, in which Dano played a part).

Rotten Tomatoes' critics, perhaps less sensitive, are in opposition to us, averaging 94%, and their audience average is 73%. We streamed it about two weeks ago on Amazon Prime.

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