“Wildlife”

***

(PG-13, 1:44)

“Wildlife,” Paul Dano’s keenly intelligent and quietly piercing directing debut, is about a marriage that collapses during fall 1960. It’s a dry season in Great Falls, Mont., and 14-year-old Joe Brinson (Australian actor Ed Oxenbould) watches as his newly unemployed father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), impulsively leaves town to help fight a forest fire raging in the mountains nearby. Dad’s departure ignites a different kind of conflagration at home, where Joe’s mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), releases years of pent-up dissatisfaction and emerges into a defiant new understanding of herself.

Anyone who can remember the first time they saw their parents as broken, vulnerable individuals and experienced a sense of powerlessness verging on paralysis should recognize Joe’s plight. His circumstances are especially painful because they seem to materialize out of nowhere, the product of a sudden shift in the emotional weather that turns out to have been a long time in the making.

As the story opens, the Brinsons have recently moved to Montana from Idaho, not the first time Jerry has uprooted them on a whim. While we see Mom and Dad being affectionate with each other early on, the cracks begin to appear soon after Jerry loses his job teaching golf at a country club. Jeanette, eager to make the best of things, gets a job as a swim teacher and encourages her husband to take whatever work he can get.

But Jerry, his pride too wounded for him to accept any old job, decides to join the men making their way toward fire country — a poorly paid gig and a reckless act of machismo that becomes the last straw for the long-suffering Jeanette. Meanwhile, Joe, though busy with school and football, good-naturedly supplements their meager income by working part time at a photographer’s studio.

Jerry is absent for a long stretch of the picture, and Gyllenhaal makes you feel the weight of his absence. Without trying to clarify, much less redeem, Jerry’s crisis of masculinity, he makes him a decent, likable, frustrated and frustrating figure, someone whose good intentions and misguided impulses spring from the same uncertain place.

Jeanette, played by Mulligan in a vividly nuanced, career-best performance, presents an even more ferocious study in emotional confusion. Her patience and optimism flaring into rage and resentment, she stews in her sense of abandonment for a while before boldly embracing her liberation. Before long she has begun seeing a wealthy, older divorced man named Warren Miller (Bill Camp, superbly controlled), a cynical and repellent guy who can nonetheless offer her a stability she has never known.

What’s especially unnerving about this isn’t just the scandalous prospect of adultery but the way Jeanette effectively betrays Joe in the process. She neglects her son one moment and directs her fury at him the next, finally bringing him to a painfully awkward dinner with Warren where the ugly truth is dragged into the open. Remarkably, despite his rigorous adherence to Joe’s perspective, Dano doesn’t forsake Jeanette here or sell her out. He’s there to catch her even as she’s coming apart.

One could read Jeanette’s transformation, coming at the tail end of the ’50s, as a violent, symbolic rejection of the conformity, patriarchy and other stifling social attitudes that held sway during that decade. But Mulligan’s performance is too specific and too wrenching to be reduced to a mere generational statement. This is her most fully formed role since her performance in another early ’60s piece, the British coming-of-age drama “An Education,” and in some ways it feels like a rejoinder, perhaps even a corrective. The American suburbia of “Wildlife” promises a different awakening, and an infinitely sadder one.