Review: Bryan Cranston retreats and observes in literary drama ‘Wakefield’

The film “Wakefield,” adapted from an E.L. Doctorow short story originally published in the New Yorker about a disgruntled family man’s retreat into hermit-like introspection, has been lovingly traced over by writer-director Robin Swicord (“The Jane Austen Book Club”) into a neat movie package of voyeuristic drama and actorly transformation. If it struggles to make sense emotionally (or logistically), it benefits from the confident pace of a literate, mainstream entertainment, and the tactical showmanship of star Bryan Cranston, who’s made something of a specialty out of the average guy going through a metamorphosis.

We all occasionally need a break from our existence, and society is OK with that. It’s why weekends and tourism were invented. But when Howard Wakefield (Cranston) — Manhattan lawyer and suburban husband/father, daily commuter and steadfast grumbler — sees his opportunity, he allows it to morph into a full-fledged disappearance from life, his wife (Jennifer Garner) and his teenage girls. With one notable asterisk: He doesn’t need to go very far to do it, simply decamping to the garage attic, where a window allows him a front-row view on the fallout from his impromptu vanishing.

After a late night walk home from a train stranded due to a power outage — musing to us in narration about “collapsing civilization” — Howard follows a raccoon into his attic. Distracted by the discovery that he can spy on his worried wife, Diana, and triggered by memories of arguments with her, he postpones making his entrance until it’s too late in his mind for it to be reasonably excused. Drawn to his self-imposed exile, he imagines himself a rebel from domesticity, scavenging for food, growing a hobo beard and scrutinizing his wife’s actions from across the driveway.

As his family learns to move on, Howard looks backward for clues and — surprise — learns that his cynicism about his marriage, and sense of entrapment, is a product of his own making. “Wakefield” sports a tantalizing notion: If you could keep tabs on your world at the expense of your personal dignity and ability to affect it, would you gain wisdom or go mad? Or both? But what Doctorow made weirdly engrossing with the unreliable narrator format, Swicord’s faithfully literate, redemption-minded movie makes increasingly less credible as it glides from spoken insight to silly incident and most off-putting, its jarring ending (which is true to Doctorow’s abruptness, but lacks its punch).

Minus rough edges, and cushioned for meaning, “Wakefield” is the most audience-friendly version of what is at base an unpleasant scenario. That isn’t always a bad thing — Swicord’s grip on the material is assured — but after a while it loses the thread of alpha-male disintegration in the interests of finessing the re-entry.

It’s a heavy load Cranston’s got, from selling an interior monologue that is sporadically starchy and unneeded, to finding the right mix of comic and pathetic in his physicality. But his Jack Lemmon-esque superpowers — a cocktail of darkness and light — are put to good use, even when the movie is most strained by the character’s impossibility.

Wakefield’s wife, Diana, poses a different problem, now that she’s a person and not an abstract filtered through Howard’s narration in Doctorow’s story. Garner effectively draws our sympathy, whether seen from afar like a lonely, surveilled “Rear Window” character, or shown in flashback when she was an unwitting conquest for Howard, feeling competitive after learning that his best friend (Jason O’Mara) was dating her. A flesh-and-blood Diana makes the willful cruelty of Howard’s actions, and complaints about her, only even more acute and harder to reconcile.

Yet “Wakefield” remains oddly watchable, like a Cheever-esque ’60s-era suburban melodrama that’s slick, unreal, yet has a burrowing drive. You can simultaneously recognize it as a misfire and want more movies like it.

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‘Wakefield’

Rating: R, for some sexual material and language

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Royal, West L.A.; Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino

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