Murdoch wrote: Mon Nov 12, 2018 1:32 am
I had high expectations going into this with Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal in the cast but I wasn't impressed by much of anything here. The central figure of the film, Joe, isn't very interesting. Oxenbould is a sweet looking kid and he played the role well, I just wish Dano had given him more to do. He's a wide-eyed innocent who never breaks free from that archetype, which becomes particularly frustrating as the primary conflict of the film unfolds and he becomes little more than an often silent witness to the events. Gyllenhaal as Joe's dad disappears from the screen with little warning, and while the film lingers with Oxenbould and Mulligan's awkward exchanges, the far more interesting event of Gyllenhaal fighting a forest fire right at the edge of town is oddly given no screen time. His early departure feels forced and Mulligan's sudden descent into desperate housewife gave me a sense of whiplash. What follows is a dull affair that's both predictable and tedious in how it unfolds. Oxenbould name-checks dad here and there and yet the forest fire blaring just outside town is treated with the same concern as a distant war rather than a dangerous infero that's a short drive away.
Worse yet, it's resolved off-screen and Gyllenhaal gets a short few lines about it being hell, then the film tosses the whole thing aside, happy to have had its contrivance and unwilling to go any further with it.
I can't really understand why this is garnering so much praise but I found it a chore to sit through. The location shots are nice but it's a forgettable experience. Hopefully Dano can come up with something more compelling next time.
Looking for the fire or Gyllenhaal to save the film sounds like something the Oxenbould character would do, and I'm more than a little of the Oxenbould character myself. I’ll help carry the torch for this one, but there’s no way to be objective; as a child of divorce, raised by a mother prone to depression and who’d been tsk-tsked out of working while married, this landed home hard. Emotionally it fell somewhere between the traumatic accuracy of
Squid and the Whale and the appreciative reflection of
20th Century Women. Like bad future above, I was in in from the start, whether I wanted to be or not.
It helps that the film played to my inclinations: I prefer watching intelligent, complicated women process things to watching literal fires being fought. Gyllenhaal and the fire are shoved to the side for a reason, it’s not their film, and boy howdy would it be wrong for a work concerned with female roles and repression to run off and become a testosterone-fueled adventure story. (Though Dano directed, I like that a husband-wife team wrote the script, and hope Kazan’s name doesn’t drop from the conversation.)
As someone who’s been a fan of Mulligan’s since she was so good in that one
Doctor Who episode, and had been wondering if she’d ever find a lead in anything as impressive as that one
Doctor Who episode, this was a long time coming. Her face is the movie, couldn’t not watch it. There are always a dozen different things going on behind her character’s eyes – the expectation of her sacrifice, her need for survival, the accumulation of dashed hopes, the guilt of playing along and the urge to not play along, the desire to go and make her own failures. There is a life in that mind and too much of it’s not reflected in the life she’s living. I love that there’s no pat righteousness to the character, I love watching her realize her own selfishness.
Gyllenhaal’s casting is perfect for me because I don’t think much of him as an actor. All effort, no depth, only capable of one thing at a time. It’s a perfect off-balance of concern and talent.
And I like the movies where the children observe more than act, granting all the events around them the weight of influence and possibility. The film is Mulligan’s, but it’s Joe’s film. (His job – and the predictable, perfect final shot – underline that.) He’s at the age when he can see his parents as people, is starting to gauge how much of his self is made from the flaws of each. I don’t know that Oxenbould is any good at anything else, but he gives good attention and that’s everything here. He’s good enough at that that I was disappointed when the film would get insecure and turn and show us what he was looking at – like that fire.
