Wilson
(USA, 94 min.)
Dir. Craig Johnson, Writ. Daniel Clowes
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Judy Greer, Isabella
Amara, Cheryl Hines
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Laura Dern as Pippi and Woody Harrelson as Wilson in Wilson.
Photo by Wilson Webb / Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation |
Wilson is a man from another era. He isn’t one for cell
phones and he has an utter disdain for the Internet. Real communication, to
Wilson, is that old-school person-to-person stuff. That’s too bad because
Wilson really isn’t much of a people person.
Don’t expect to get any warm and fuzzy feelings for this character. Wilson is an unabashed asshole. However, he lives in his own special universe—a nice solipsistic little place of good intentions and curmudgeonly ranting. He’s a decent person at heart, but he has no idea whatsoever on how to articulate his cheery vibes into something to which other people can relate.
Wilson, based on the graphic novel character by Daniel
Clowes, wanders the gentrifying streets of Minneapolis-St. Paul and observes
life through a distorted lens that’s a mix of rose-coloured hues and poopy
browns. He, much like the character of the book, wonders at the point of it all
in a society that’s become utterly disconnected. Humorous episodes see Wilson
taking a seat beside a passenger on an empty bus or shimmying up to the lone guy
relieving himself in a line of otherwise vacant urinals and forcing a
conversation with his fellow man.
Wilson’s pointed view on life is dark and sarcastic, but
while it’s often laced with unpalatable opinions and language far more
colourful than the film’s neutral palette, his words often contain grains of
bitter truth. His musings and rambling thoughts don’t always play as well on
film as they do in the singular images of Clowes’s graphic novel: the concision
of a speech bubble sometimes works better than a speech that plays out in full.
His thoughts seem a little dated, too, but Wilson’s also a man of another era
and he doesn’t quite understand his time or fully grasp it. He only knows that
the world is a little bit fucked.
As played by Woody Harrelson, though, Wilson works precisely because the title character is such a
blowhard. Cranky and ranty characters like Wilson are hard to play with any
measure of success—go too crabby and audiences might be turned off, go too
funny and audiences might become irritable—but Harrelson just the right
balance. The sweetness of his scenes with co-star Judy Greer, who shines in a
memorable role as Wilson’s dog nanny, reveals a kind soul underneath Wilson’s cantankerous
exterior.
Wilson captures
the spirit of the graphic novel largely thanks to Harrelson’s performance. His
Wilson is both an affable everyman—a crass, hot-tempered George Bailey-George
Costanza hybrid—and an out to lunch pseudo-intellectual doofus on his own
desert island of distorted reality. Harrelson is very funny and oddly endearing
even if Wilson deserves every punch to the face he gets.
The odyssey of navel-gazing, self-discovery, and sardonic
sermonising inevitably makes Wilson a
bit of a rocky road as it bumps along numerous tonal shifts. Even if Wilson is inconsistent in its style of
humour, it’s a reliably funny film since Harrelson has the right grasp for the
character’s ability to inhabit both situational humour and comic observations.
Wilson follows the
graphic novel rather faithfully—one could read Clowes’s graphic novel as a
storyboard just as much as source material—as the writer adapts his own work
and fills in the action that plays out in between the frames of the cartoon.
The film therefore feels like a fuller version of the same story, as Clowes and
director Craig Johnson (The Skeleton
Twins) devise a straightforward narrative in place of the loose episodic
style of the graphic novel. This Wilson
is driven by its plot more than the printed predecessor is as Harrelson’s
shaggy boob finds himself on a road trip of recovery/self-discovery when the
sudden death of his father prompts him to repair some relationships with the
past.
Cue Wilson’s ex-wife Pippi, whom Laura Dern plays
uproariously well in one of the film’s improvements from the graphic novel.
Pippi is on the mend from her own seedy past as a junkie/sex worker and Wilson
never lets her tell her own story. As they reconnect and find the daughter that
Pippi gave up for adoption when Wilson went MIA from their relationship, Wilson
embellishes Pippi’s past as a lady of the night with half-truths, unchecked facts,
and outright falsehoods. Watching Dern’s aggrieved face every time Harrelson
babbles about Pippi’s not-entirely-true past on the streets is one of Wilson’s darkly funny delights. An epic
catfight between Dern and co-star Cheryl Hines, similarly, is unhinged tomfoolery:
a punch in the face to nice, orderly suburban America.
The film gives Wilson and Pippi a taste of the life they
could have had when Wilson tracks down their biological daughter Claire. A
stalking session ensures, followed by a little roughhousing in the shopping
mall. Wilson and Pippi would not have been great parents.
However, Wilson finds in Claire (Isabella Amara) a rare
treat. She actually wants to listen to him and spend time with him. Never mind
that he’s off-balance, deranged, and a borderline-kidnapper—Claire shares his
sarcastic sense of humour and unique brand of pessimistic observation. The fact
that someone like Wilson can both produce and nurture the next generation
either gives hope for the future or paints a dire omen for society depending on
how one chooses to view it. The optimism shines through in Harrelson’s goofy
performance, though, since Wilson’s earnest desire to repair his relationship
with the family he never had suggests that people can change. No man, no matter
how cranky, vile, or foul he may be, is beyond repair.
Wilson is now in theatres from Fox Searchlight Pictures.
