The creative team responsible for the new indie comedy Wilson is not short on impressive credits. Between them all, these collective minds behind the scenes can take credit for the likes of Ghost World, The Skeleton Twins, Art School Confidential, The Visitor, and Loving. How then could the folks responsible for such a great roster of films fail to make anything worthwhile out of material ripe with the makings of a quirky and delightful human comedy? After having seen Wilson, I’m not sure I know how to fully answer that myself, but there’s no denying that this team has indeed succeeded in making one of the most uncomfortable and uninvolving comedies of the year.
In Wilson, Woody Harrelson plays the title character, a single man in his early 50s seeped in social awkwardness, who spends his days doting on his dog and alienating everyone he encounters through inappropriate exchanges and by insisting they embrace true human connection, according to the way he sees it. When Wilson discovers that his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern) gave away their infant daughter for adoption 17 years earlier, he takes this newfound discovery as a sign that his longing for a meaningful human connection will soon be fulfilled.
As a film, one of Wilson’s biggest problems is that it’s unable to transform the awkwardness generated by its main character, and the situations he finds himself in, into something watchable. Seeing Wilson have a brief exchange with a woman buying a cat toy at a pet store leads to him rear ending her in the parking lot as a way of getting to know her. The sequence comes across as dizzying, sloppy, and unfunny, with Wilson failing to succeed in his goal and the audience just wishing the scene would be over. Not helping matters much is a stuntedness that exists in all of the film’s characters, with virtually no one coming across as anything more than an archetype of someone who might exist in real life. In a sense, it hardly matters, since most of the moments in Wilson don’t really register as anything genuine, but instead resemble an endless sequence of Mr. Bean sketches.
Given all of this, it’s not surprising therefore to discover that Wilson comes packed with so many tonal issues that it’s almost impossible not to get whiplash by being asked to cry and laugh almost simultaneously. Most of this is because Wilson just can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. The film paints itself as a family dramedy, a portrait of a misanthrope, a road trip movie, and a love story. It wants to be all of these so badly that it fails at all of these attempts by changing gears just when the story begins to gain momentum. Besides having a pace that’s all over, the editing of Wilson does the film absolutely no favors whatsoever, with certain sequences intercut with others to horrible effect. The worst of these is the one which sees Wilson bonding by a lake with his long-lost daughter Claire (Isabella Amara). The scene is a sweet and tender moment that is continuously interrupted by shots of Pippi getting into a full-on catfight complete with vase throwing and punching.
Harrelson proves to be the only reason Wilson manages to not be the TOTAL waste of time it was certainly on its way toward becoming. The actor uses his trademark delivery and skilled comic timing to such great effect here and makes an otherwise unbearable character almost likable. Dern doesn’t have as much to do as she should, but she makes what she does have work. Her portrait of Pippi as a woman continuously trying to be a better version of herself is heartfelt and real. The rest of the cast has so little reason to exist in the film that they hardly bear mentioning, save for Amara as Claire, who shows real promise in her handful of scenes. Yet the script does nothing but shortchange her too.
There was a part of me that went into Wilson really wanting to like it. I had high hopes that the film would be the kind of accessible, yet unique indie that hit the same marks as something like Little Miss Sunshine. One of the reasons for this was my attraction to characters with absolutely no filter whatsoever who dare to say whatever is on their mind, regardless of how inappropriate it is, or how it could possibly be perceived. It’s true, Wilson did have a number of refreshing instances in which its title character baffled and insulted many who crossed his path by saying what he really thought at that given moment. However, with a jumbled screenplay and a mishandled execution, such moments just weren’t enough to save the film.
