Scott Treadwell is a conflicted young man. At 25, he knows loss and sacrifice and isolation and hopelessness than many of us experience in a lifetime. He's barely hanging on. He has two low-paying jobs - one boss is crude and belligerent, the other kind and empathetic almost beyond belief.
Scott (played by Riley Cusick, who also wrote and directed "The Wild Man"), must work such long hours to provide for his dad, whose cumulative life losses have driven him to a rare psychiatric syndrome in which the patient believes he is a wild animal. Dad lives this delusion to the hilt, dressed 24/7 in an elaborate bear costume, which is oddly adorned with ram's horns.
Frequently the bear-dad's nightmares drive him to flee their modest house and roam the nearby woods and neighborhoods, foraging for tasty grass. Scott's dad is well-known by local authorities, who mostly indulge his flights of terror and treat Scott with sympathy.
Scott's selfless devotion to his ailing dad is rife with inner conflict,. He quit school to care for him, and he sees no future for either of them. His selflessness is admirable until it begins to remind you of Sydney Poitier's character in "Lilies of the Field". Poitier's Homer Smith finally agrees to build a desert chapel for a gaggle of helpless nuns, but then rebuffs the efforts of parishioners to pitch in. Likewise, Scott wallows in his own victimhood, not very attractively.
Until one of bear-dad's escapes leads him and Scott to Jackie (Jenna Kenell), a single mother who wears an ankle monitor in atonement for some unnamed crime. Jackie has lost custody of her young son, but that explains only part of the tragic mantle that clouds her eyes.
Bear-dad leads Scott to Jackie's tidy mobile home. Twice. Is some remnant of the dad inside the bear trying to be a matchmaker, to help these two lost souls find companionship and comfort? Bear-dad is mute on this, as he is on every topic.
Jackie understands the bear-dad better than anyone, including possibly Scott. With Jackie's encouragement, the faithful son begins to creep from under the rock he has pulled over himself. The tide turns when the three of them commune in a heartbreakingly exquisite scene in Jackie's living room.
This first sign of hope is countered by a brilliantly disturbing scene shortly after, in which Scott begs for the dad he knows to talk to him, even for just a minute, and the bear-dad responds by sinking deeper into his feral bear-self. It's terrifying, and you truly believe that an angry wild bear is hovering ferociously, mindlessly over his human son.
Every time Jenna Kenell (as Jackie) appears in a scene she owns it. You get the sense director Cusick just fine about that. The bear-dad's drunken lout of a brother is played by Larry Fessenden, who channels a Shining-era Jack Nicholson. No surprise that his heart turns out to be softer than you think.
Cusick builds a complex pastiche of suffering, sacrifice, lonesomeness, and despair, softened by liberal dashes of whimsical humor. And hope. Maybe Scott learns to let go of his emotional shackles. It's a film I know will return to me many times in days to come, wondering how they all turn out.
