Austin Film Festival: ‘Wakefield’ Is A Good Performance Trapped In A Not-So-Good Movie (FILM REVIEW)

[rating=4.00]

There’s something inherently disgruntling about writing a bad review for a movie starring Bryan Cranston. The actor, who’s portrayal of Walter White in AMC’s Breaking Bad single-handedly ushered in today’s Peak TV era, is such a consummate performer that his dedication to the craft is palpable. Unfortunately, while his performance is central to his latest film, Wakefield, which just made its premiere at the Austin Film Festival, it’s not nearly enough to keep it interesting — or even remotely watchable.

Cranston stars as the titular Howard Wakefield, and the movie wastes absolutely no time revealing him to be insufferably self-involved. He struts around New York City in his immaculate clothing, he cuts in line at the bakery, and rolls his eyes when his family calls checking in on him before pushing the ‘ignore’ button on his phone.

While absent almost any dialogue, the story plays out primarily in Cranston’s narration. It’s here that we first learn about how he and his wife, Diana (Jennifer Garner), keep their 15-year marriage exciting. They attend parties, she talks to men, pretending to flirt with them just enough to get their attention, while he watches from afar, pacing pack and forth like some caged tiger in $600 shoes.

“Jealously was a reliable stimulant,” he explains to the audience, though it’s clear that their method is far from full-proof. Wakefield, as he’s called by his wife, a subtle nod to the undercurrent of formality in their relationship, becomes unable to separate his real feelings from those he puts on as part of their elaborate foreplay, which further weighs down on their relationship.

Writer/director Robin Swicord manages to create an intriguing atmosphere with a distinct sense of pending unease very early on. With camerawork reminiscent of Hitchcock, and an affluent suburban couple with a relationship derivative of a Polanski film, Wakefield starts out incredibly promising.

Unfortunately, the film’s unable to maintain its compelling setup, and starts to derail before the end of the first act.

One night, after his nightly commute back from New York City to his home in the Hamptons, his train breaks down. While the railroad provides him, and everyone else, rides back to their cars, for some reason this is played up as some kind of awakening for his character, implying that he had to fight his way through the savage wilderness and reconnected to his own long-buried primal nature.

The absurd profundity continues once he gets home after he chases a raccoon up into the attic above the detached garage that faces the back of his home. While up there, he sees into his back window of his home, watching his wife calmly waiting for him to return from work as she prepares dinner for them and their twin daughters. Suddenly, he feels comfortable, his physical detachment from his family finally lining up with his emotional one. Having removed himself from his own life, he watches the fallout with a gleeful exuberance akin to a child’s temper tantrum where they hope they die just so everyone else will be sorry.

Then, after falling asleep in front of the window and waking up the next morning in a brief panic, Wakefield decides to go ahead and run with it. He immediately scoffs at the pinnings of his professional life, like the comfort of a shower, or “the armor of a clean shirt,” as he puts it. His wife reports him as a missing person to the local police, prompting him to suddenly question her commitment to their marriage by going to work later that same day — from the attic above her garage where he’s been hiding for roughly 16 hours.

From then on, the film mostly becomes a series of disconnected scenes chronicling Wakefield’s descent into vagrancy, some of which work as entertaining vignettes, while others involve a fight with Russian junk collectors over a pair of brand new shoes someone had thrown in the trash. (Seriously, is this a Hamptons thing? Like, any of it?)

Of course, Wakefield’s ‘homeless by choice’ story arc has all the egocentric self-importance of every upper-middle class kid who read Into The Wild and thought panhandling would be a good way to ‘buck the system, mannnn.’ He thinks he’s independent, but clings to his attic hideaway, using the possessions his family stored up there over the years that become imperative to his daily routine.

In the end, Wakefield is a film that thinks it’s far more clever than it is, trying to wink at the audience with an “ambiguous” ending that was so painfully obvious it could be seen coming from about 10 minutes in. The fact that it was adapted from a New Yorker short story by E. L. Doctorow perhaps explains the hint of smugness well enough, but  the real shortfall stems Swicord’s inability to stretch out a paper-thin premise into a feature-length film, despite her impressive history of adapting works for film.

Of course, this didn’t stop the audience from blurting out “what happened at the end?” at the very beginning of the Q&A with Swicord afterwards.

Really, the entire experience can be summed up in one of Wakefield’s long, self-indulgent bits of narrative tripe, where he explains that “in the wild, everything becomes food. Or not.” So, despite the fact that Wakefield is never actually in the actual wild (aside from one brief moment), the character, and the film, can’t even commit to a basic statement of pure philosophical hyperbole.

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