Wildlife Review

Paul Dano holds the camera still and waits, and the waiting is the whole method. Carey Mulligan does the best work of her career as Jeanette, moving from brittle cheer to open contempt inside a single dinner scene with Warren Miller, the car dealer played by Bill Camp with a wet, apologetic menace. Watch her face when she asks her son whether he still thinks she is pretty. Gyllenhaal has maybe a third of the running time and uses it well: his Jerry is a man whose pride has curdled into something childish, and the scene where he pushes Joe to say he respects him is hard to sit through.

Diego Garcia shoots the Montana interiors like Hopper paintings, yellow lamplight and too much empty room, and keeps the fire on the ridge at a distance so it stays a rumor instead of a spectacle. The trouble is Joe. Ed Oxenbould is asked to watch and absorb and almost never to act, which leaves the emotional center deliberately blank, and a film this controlled starts to feel airless somewhere in the last half hour. The closing portrait studio scene reaches for a reconciliation the script has not paid for.