The Brinsons seem like an average American family. Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) works at a local golf course while Jeanne (Carey Mulligan) helps raise their 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould). Joe is playing football, but mostly just to keep his dad happy, while Jeanne keeps up their new home in Montana. It’s 1960, and the world is changing, especially definitions of happiness, family, and the gender roles in a household. When Jerry loses his job, Jeanne gets one at the YMCA, and Mr. Brinson starts to drift away. We get the feeling this has happened before, that Jerry Brinson is the kind of man who doesn’t take the speedbumps of life smoothly. They just moved here after some undefined problems elsewhere, and now their life is in a state of upheaval yet again. And then Jerry decides to go fight wildfires far enough away that he basically is leaving his wife and son behind. How would you respond?

Joe longs for his father’s return, especially as he starts to see changes in his mother. She dresses and carries herself differently, and soon there’s a man (Bill Camp) on the Brinson couch who may be able to offer them what they no longer have like stability and companionship. Can you blame Jeanne for wanting them? The brilliant aspect of Dano’s adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1990 novel, co-written with Zoe Kazan, is that it avoids blame. Jeanne isn't a typical villain. “Wildlife” allows its characters to be complicated, fallible. In fact, it’s in part about that moment when we realize our parents can be selfish—sometimes you have to be in order to survive. But one never senses judgment from Dano, Kazan, Gyllenhaal, or Mulligan—they recognize that there’s beauty even in the mistakes we make in life. It’s what makes us human.

In keeping with that theme, Dano also allows his characters breathing space. More than most films, you can see Dano’s cast acting in the silent moments. What I mean is that we have a film culture, especially in America, that is so reliant on dialogue and motion, but I was struck by the amount of times I caught people in “Wildlife” listening, processing, realizing—all those silent, unflashy things that real people do all the time. Dano knows he has a mega-talented cast and so he does what a lot of actor-turned-directors do in that he lets keep the audience engaged purely through the believability of their characters. 

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