Review of Wildlike (2015) by Eric O — 08 May 2015

FINE WRITING AND DIRECTING MAKE WILDLIKE A REAL FIND.

Wildlike is about a teenage runaway, a girl named Mackenzie. Otherwise, the film is not easy to categorize. I am crazy about this movie, however, and I've decided to think of it as the first really fine film in the career of a really great director. Wildlike is an encounter between two very different people, a wonderfully fine tuned study that held my attention throughout owing to writer-director Frank Hall Green's unique sensibilities and attention to every important detail of performance and story.

Wildlike is neither a sappy, feel-good film about a teenager's "journey" nor a grim art house account of her inevitable decline. You will feel great after seeing it, however, because Green has gotten everything perfectly right. In depicting the film's flawed and fallible people, the thoughtful wisdom of ordinary adults, and the painfully naive efforts at intimacy of the film's teenager, Green has eschewed easy Hollywood tropes and gut punches for a rather modest plot, the vehicle for presenting the utterly fascinating chemistry between Wildlike's two main characters. Bruce Greenwood plays Rene Bartlett, a fortyish hiker who reluctantly allows runaway Mackenzie (Ella Purnell) to accompany him through Denali National Park on what he had planned to be a very solitary trek. Their performances are first rate and the heart of the film. Greenwood says more, and more deeply, in ten seconds of facial expression than you can possibly imagine, and Purnell is perfect with her cool but sadly awkward attempts to manipulate others or show genuine affection. Green was lucky to get these actors. Wildlike builds to a suspenseful enough climax and along the way delivers the very great pleasure of watching Greenwood and Purnell relate as they make their slow, awkward progress toward a fortunate ending.

For me, Wildlike is a film to be studied. Greenwood defies your expectations and draws you in, I think, because film is the quintessential medium for observing people, and Wildlike in every detail offers something to observe without ever breaking your reverie with the implausible or contrived. For me (someone who watches a lot of films), Wildlike is the kind of movie of exquisite good taste you hope to find but only very rarely ever do.