Wildlife · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

They drive out to look at the fire. That's the whole scene: Jerry takes his son up the road, they stop, and there on a far ridge is a glowing seam working its way along, miles off. The two of them stand and watch. Nothing is asked of them. Nothing could be. It's the only time Paul Dano's film goes anywhere near its own disaster, and what it does there is look.

Everything else happens in rooms.

Dano's invention is a camera position. Richard Ford's novel is narrated by a grown Joe from a position of safety, which means the prose can explain; Dano and Zoe Kazan deleted the narrator, dropped the boy from sixteen to fourteen, and then had to solve what they'd broken. How do you film a fourteen-year-old's understanding of his parents' marriage with no voice to interpret it and almost no point-of-view shots? Their answer: put the camera where a watchful, frightened child would stand. Near enough to hear. Far enough to be forgotten. The film is about Joe's vision without ever once being inside it.

Deleuze has a name for that image, and it earns its keep here: the dicisign. He built it out of Pasolini's free indirect camera — one that doesn't take a character's eyes but perceives him perceiving, picking up his temperature while staying its own instrument. You feel it in the room as a second presence. That's why Wildlife can be so cool on the surface and so hard to sit through underneath. The compositions are frontal, squared, near-symmetrical, arranged by an adult. The place they're taken from belongs to a boy in a doorway.

Deleuze's two volumes turn on one break. In the older cinema — the movement-image — a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the act changes the situation. That circuit is what plot is made of. Then a cinema arrives where the circuit snaps: people see things they cannot answer. Deleuze calls such a character a voyant, a seer. Joe is fourteen, in a rented house, in 1960, watching his mother become someone else. He has no move. Not: he chooses restraint. He has no move.

What fills the space where his action would go is what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations — things given to be looked at and listened to, and nothing else. The fire is the great one. It reaches the Brinsons as smoke on the horizon, ash on a windshield, an amber contamination of daylight, and, best of all, radio bulletins reporting containment percentages that never improve. Information you can do nothing with, arriving on a schedule.

Jerry runs the other way, and fails differently. He loses the job, refuses the humiliation of being handed it back, and signs on to the fire line for a dollar an hour: a man reaching for an action big enough to answer his situation. The film declines to go with him. No crosscutting, no men in yellow gear on a burning ridge, no parallel montage delivering heroism at the moment the household needs it least. Dano amputates the obviously cinematic half of his own story, and the hole that leaves in the narrative is precisely the hole in the house. Then Jerry comes home and sets a small fire of his own, pathetic where the public one is sublime and beyond his competence in the same way. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: a man who can still act, whose acts no longer reach what is wrong.

The refusal to cut away does something formally exact. Deleuze separates a relative out-of-field — the next room, the road, space you could pan to — from an absolute one: a beyond that isn't anywhere, that doesn't extend the set but changes the whole of it. A fire near the Canadian border is, on paper, a location. By never going there, Dano converts it into the second kind. It stops being a place and becomes a condition of the light. The grading closes the circuit: Jeanette's newer, brighter clothes and Warren Miller's carpeted house are pitched at the same temperature as the burn, colour absorbing the scene and its feeling. And because Oklahoma is standing in for Montana, there are no postcard mountains, only a low horizon and a sky the smoke can't hide in. A rebate decision hands the film a weather it can't get out from under.

Then the house. Thin walls, someone else's furniture, rooms that all look like waiting rooms. Deleuze has a term for spaces that have stopped functioning as settings where things get done and become pure holders of feeling: any-space-whatever. The Brinson house isn't where the drama happens. It is the drama.

And the camera stays in it after people leave. That habit comes straight from Ozu, and the debt is specific: Late Spring's frontal address, figures squared inside doorframes and hallway apertures, the room held a beat after the actor walks out. Those held empty rooms are where Deleuze thought cinema first gave us time directly instead of as the measure of somebody's movement — dead time, the everyday allowed to weigh what it weighs. Matthew Hannam and Louise Ford cut for duration rather than emphasis all the way through, playing scenes in few setups and holding past the point where coverage would let us off.

The dinner at Miller's is where it pays. Jeanette drinks, dances, performs a version of herself for a man with a hi-fi, and her son watches from a chair. Dano plays it long and refuses to editorialize. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, would call that dance a gest: a posture that makes an entire social relation visible without anyone stating it. A thirty-four-year-old woman in 1960, three years before Friedan gave the thing a name, with no vocabulary for her situation, using the only form of assertion her town has on offer. No reaction shot arrives to tell you what to think of her. That refusal is Bazin's oldest argument in practice — cut, and you've decided for the viewer; hold, and the ambiguity in front of the lens stays the viewer's problem. Cassavetes held Gena Rowlands that way in A Woman Under the Influence. Akerman built Jeanne Dielman by repeating the same fixed frontal setups until duration reported a collapse no dialogue would admit. Kazan adds the family inheritance: Splendor in the Grass, her grandfather's film, where an actress was likewise permitted to be unsympathetic and unexplained.

And then the job Joe takes. Portrait studio, after school: large-format camera, hot lights, posing stool. He learns, at the worst possible moment of his life, how to arrange a family so that it looks like one. That's the film handing you its own device. Deleuze has a name for an image that composes its object and then quietly stands in for it — crystalline description — and a studio portrait is the household version, a small machine for producing an intact family out of people who aren't one. A boy is being trained to run it while his own comes apart. The film stops on an image rather than a settlement, abruptly, the way The 400 Blows stops. Truffaut's boy, who also saw his mother with another man and could neither report it nor understand it, is the direct structural ancestor; The Last Picture Show supplies the flat period light and the adolescent who learns adult infidelity by proximity, without nostalgic scoring.

Forward, honesty is required. Wildlife was reviewed well and seen by almost nobody, and no school has formed behind it. Its documented consequences are careerist: it turned Mulligan toward the harder, less accommodating roles that followed, and established Dano as a director on the strength of one picture he has yet to follow. What it proved is smaller than influence and more durable. It proved the full apparatus of the time-image needs no desert, no ruin, no European art house to license it — a rented house in Great Falls, a boy in a doorway, and a fire nobody drives to will carry it. It proved you can strip a melodrama of everything that amplifies it and have more left over, not less.

The question it leaves open is the one it won't answer for Joe. He's fourteen, he has learned to compose a family into a frame, and he has seen what the frame is for. Nothing in the film says what a person does with that.

Watch it again for the thresholds — doorframes, windshields, the back seat, the edge of the frame. Count how many the film puts him in. Then notice that the camera is standing in one too.