How would you feel if you had the chance to observe your loved ones from a distance?
Suburban life, so much is the same, week after week. Who hasn’t had the impulse to put their life on hold for a moment, just vanish completely?
Well, Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) in the movie Wakefield, not just thinks this but actually gives in to that impulse, by chance, and ends up observing his family from his garage. Howard is returning home one evening when the train he is travelling in breaks down. He walks home and arrives to find that there is a blackout in his neighbourhood. He gets into the little ramshackle garage, which also has a fairly large attic above, as he chases away a raccoon. Once inside, he looks out of the fan-shaped window, and realizes that he has a good view of the dining room and meeting area of his house. Fascinated, he decides to observe his wife Diana (Jennifer Garner) and children for a while. He derives a perverse pleasure in his wife’s panic as she makes repeated calls to his cellphone. He ignores her calls and continues to watch as she gives up and, in anger, throws his dinner into the trash can outside. But Howard Wakefield is now hooked.
Wakefield, based on E L Doctorow’s short story of the same name, hones in on that unseen slice of self-indulgence, and self-importance that is sometimes unknown even to our own selves. But more than that it highlights the monotony of life that we become blind to out of sheer habit.
I left myself. Unshackled, I will become the Howard Wakefield I was meant to be.
Do we have other versions of ourselves that we will somehow evolve into if we were ‘unshackled’? Will it be like a new set of clothes that we just slip into?
These are interesting questions that Wakefield leads you to think about. The movie is not without its flaws, though. It seems improbable that in the age of CSI kind of tech, Howard was not traced. We never see what his children felt about his disappearance. And the ending was not an ending at all. It felt like the movie got cut off in the middle, somehow.
Yet, if we can ignore these annoying niggles, go past the narrow confines that we have drawn in our mind for what a movie should be, then we will find ourselves enjoying it. Just like Howard did, when he came unshackled.
I cannot end this review without mentioning the brilliance of Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Trumbo) who makes the movie a worthwhile watch.
Rating: 3.5/5
