WAKEFIELD Review

RELEASE DATE: May 26, 2017 (Limited and VOD Platforms)
DIRECTOR: Robin Swicord
MPAA RATING: R
RUNTIME: 108 minutes

It’s hard to like Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston), the character that Wakefield is named after, and to writer/director Robin Swicord’s credit, she doesn’t make us try.

Howard – a successful attorney at a high-profile firm in the city who owns a beautiful house in the suburbs and has a wife and two children – decides one day to disappear. He moves into the attic space above his garage, and from there he does nothing except spy into the kitchen window below, observing his family, who have no idea what has happened to him.

He scrounges for food at night, and as the months – yes, months – go on, he resembles a vagrant, with ragged clothes and a scruffy beard. There’s no real reason behind this decision, besides the belief that his life had become monotonous.

He is not treated as an inherently empathetic figure. Instead, the film takes the interesting path to depict his decision as a twisted variant on a midlife crisis. The movie is peppered with flashbacks to when he first met his wife, Diane (Jennifer Garner), and we see the origins of his egotism as the years go on. Of course, such a connection is lost on Howard, who begins his excursion by pulling up a chair, watching the activity in his house below and entertaining himself upon seeing how predictable everyone’s actions are.

When a panicked Diane reports her husband missing in the first 24 hours, he observes with mild bemusement. When his mother-in-law (Beverly D’Angelo) rushes to the house and attempts to console her daughter, he caustically narrates her spiel. In this first act, before the flashback scenes begin, we are almost entirely with Howard in the attic. We can’t hear the conversations in the house, and his sarcastic comments are our initial perspective into who all these characters are.

This is a risky move, but for the most part, Swicord and Cranston provide just the right amount of acidity, balanced with just the right amount of irony, to make Wakefield a surreal, dark comedy. Its mood is somewhere between fantastical and cynical (imagine Howard’s early enthusiasm for his new lifestyle as George Bailey enjoying being dead), striking an eccentric balance with intentional discomfort. The point is not for you to understand but to be fascinated. Cranston’s crackling voiceover and disaffected facial expressions build the essence of his character.

But at the same time, Wakefield encounters a problem when building a feature-length film off a study of one unlikable person. As the calendar pushes onward, the seasons change and Howard’s family adjusts to life without him, the movie has less and less to say. When all we’re doing is watching Cranston rummage around garbage bins or walk through a park as passers-by scatter upon seeing his disheveled, “homeless” look, it’s hard to remain interested.

The quality of his performance is never called into question, but the screenplay’s engagement levels falter. It also gives us time to explore another fundamental question: Why? At first, the only reason Howard stays in the attic for more than a few hours is that he fell asleep and remained up there overnight. The transition from that to several months on end is inevitable from his point of view. Yet to the rest of us, it’s never explained beyond the fact that this is what the movie is about.

In that sense, Wakefield works more as a concept than as a reality, but it’s a very well developed concept. Cranston is the anchor of this entire project, and whether he’s delivering arid narration, playing off a very capable Jennifer Garner in a flashback scene, or running from angry mosquitoes when he tries to wash his face at a nearby lake, he’s a compelling center.

If anything, it makes you wonder how much better the project would have been if it were shorter, laid bare to its most essential plot points and elements. The premise is interesting, and, despite the pacing issues, the execution is alright. It’s got bitterness, balanced out by humor, wrapped in keen ambition. Not bad.