Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Wildlife
2018 · Paul Dano · Wildlife on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how often Joe stands in doorways, at the edge of frame. (staging)
Dano keeps placing Joe in doorframes, the back seat, behind glass, watching his parents from just outside the room where the marriage is happening.
Payoff: Joe never gets to be in the room where things are decided; the camera puts you exactly where he stands, watching and powerless. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls a watcher who cannot act a seer: Joe sees his parents' marriage collapse and has no move to make.
Watch how still the camera stays, even in the tensest scenes. (camera)
Diego García keeps the camera static or barely moving, framing people through doorways and windshields instead of pushing in on their faces.
Payoff: The camera stands near enough to hear and far enough to be forgotten, the way a frightened child would stand in the room. In the reading: dicisign (free indirect perception). Deleuze called this a dicisign: a camera that perceives a character perceiving, without ever becoming his eyes.
Listen for the radio giving containment percentages that never improve. (sound)
David Lang's score stays spare and drops out entirely in the film's most volatile scenes, leaving radio bulletins and room tone to carry the tension instead.
Payoff: The bulletins report a fire nobody can put out, in numbers nobody can act on, a fact you only hear, never see.
Look at the furniture in the Brinsons' rented house. (setting)
The house is thin walled, furnished by someone else, every room shaped like a waiting room. Nothing in it belongs to this family, including, increasingly, the family.
Payoff: A rented house with nobody's furniture in it is what a marriage without a foundation looks like from the outside.
Watch Carey Mulligan manufacture brightness for her son. (performance)
Mulligan plays Jeanette performing cheerfulness she does not feel, and lets you see the manufacture cost her something every time she does it.
Payoff: She is not hiding her feelings from Joe. She is improvising a mother in front of him, and you can watch the improvising.
Once you have seen it
Notice the film never once cuts to the fire line. (cutting)
Once Jerry leaves to fight the wildfire, Hannam and Ford never cut to him again. There is no footage of the fire crew, only the empty space he left in the house.
Payoff: The fire stays offscreen the entire time, so the hole it leaves in the story is exactly the hole it leaves in the family. In the reading: absolute out-of-field. By never showing the fire, Dano turns it into what the reading calls an absolute out-of-field, a beyond the film cannot reach.
Notice the film ends on the portrait studio, not a resolution. (structure)
The final job Joe takes is at a portrait studio, posing families under hot lights until they look intact. The film stops on that image instead of settling the story.
Payoff: A boy who has just watched his family fall apart is being trained to arrange families so they look whole.
Watch Jeanette dance at Miller's dinner while Joe watches from a chair. (staging)
Dano holds the dinner scene in one long unhurried take, Jeanette drinking and performing for Warren Miller's benefit, and never cuts to Joe's face to tell you how to feel.
Payoff: Nobody reacts on camera to tell you Jeanette is wrong or right. You are left to hold the judgment yourself.
Carry this in: Watch the doorways, windshields, and the back seat. Count how many frame Joe watching something he cannot change.