One of my most keenly anticipated Sundance ’18 films is Paul Dano‘s Wildlife, an adaptation of Richard Ford‘s same-titled novel, published in 1990 and set in 1960 Montana.
The main costars are Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan as the married Jerry and Jeanette Brinson; the secondary performers are Ed Oxenbould as their son Joe, and Bill Camp as — here comes the rough part — an older, richer guy named Warren Miller whom Jeanette, believe it or not, has an affair with when Jerry, having lost his country-club job, leaves the homestead to become a firefighter.
Carey Mulligan and Bill Camp? The mind reels, convulses.
The official Sundance summary sidesteps the nitty-gritty. For a fuller understanding of where this film goes and what it delivers, consider a N.Y. Times review of Ford’s book by Christopher Lehman-Haupt:
“‘In the fall of 1960, when I was 16 and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.’ So begins Richard Ford‘s disturbing new novel, ‘Wildlife’. In it, Mr. Ford seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. Its action takes place in Great Falls, Montana. The theme, too, is a familiar one in Mr. Ford’s work, a love triangle involving a mother, a father and a son.
“The 16-year-old narrator is Joe Brinson. His father is a professional golfer who teaches at a country club in Great Falls. He is a natural athlete ‘with delicate hands and a short fluid swing that was wonderful to see but never strong enough to move him into the higher competition of the game.’ This is a perfect image for the searching innocence of Joe’s father, who has brought his family from Lewiston, Idaho, ‘in the belief that people — small people like him — were making money in Montana or soon would be, and wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.’
