Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
If you get one thing out of Okja this weekend — and you should absolutely watch Okja this weekend; it’s the best Netflix movie they’ve ever produced — just know that it proves beyond a doubt that Jake Gyllenhaal is the best actor he can be when he’s being weird as shit. It’s an incontrovertible truth that Okja puts right on front street.
From the first time Gyllenhaal’s character, Dr. Johnny Wilcox, climbs up to the mountain home of young Mija and her grandfather, he’s a whole lot to take. Emerging sweaty and bedraggled from his climb, Johnny wheezes and whines but still manages to frame his ascent as one of triumph:
Dr. Johnny Wilcox is kind of a cross between the self-aggranzing adventurousness of the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, the relentless media presence of a Chris Hardwick, and the sniveling demeanor of Beauty and the Beast‘s LeFou. He’s loathsome from the first moment we see him, but he’s also fascinating. Particularly once we see him break into his on-screen persona, which is much closer (but not all the way) to Gyllenhaal’s real life movie-star persona. We learn that Wilcox has become something of a mascot for the Mirando corporation, putting an eco-friendly face on their ruthless global strip-mining.
Wilcox pops up a few more times in the film, including one memorably disturbing sequence in which he partakes of the flesh of one of the flim’s super-pigs in a moment of weakness that is absolutely filmed to evoke a sexual vibe. Yeah, so it’s the weirdest. But, in my opinion at the very least, it’s a brilliantly fascinating, dazzlingly big, and delectably weird performance. One that its in perfectly with Jake Gyllenhaal’s best work.
Because here’s the secret no one knows. Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of an actor called Jake. His chiseled good looks have fooled Hollywood on many occasions, but Jake Gyllenhaal’s true purpose in the Hollywood ecosystem is not to be a handsome leading man. It’s to be a weird little troll. Sometimes with leading-man good looks to disarm people, sure. But mostly the looks are inconsequential. Jake is here to be weird, and we should only ever let him.
Take a quick tour through Gyllenhaal’s filmography and you’ll know it’s true. His least successful roles — Love & Other Drugs; The Prince of Persia; even the otherwise junky-good The Day After Tomorrow — are the ones that were most closely tied to a traditional leading-man career plan. Which fully disregards the fact that Gyllenhaal’s career kicked off with an uninterrupted string of teenage weirdos, from Bubble Boy to Donnie Darko to The Good Girl. Then somewhere around the time he was considered for the Spider-Man role, when Tobey Maguire was maybe going to get replaced for Spider-Man 3, all of a sudden Hollywood starting thinking of him as a leading man, and they couldn’t get it out of their heads. He had his successes, of course.
It wasn’t until Nightcrawler, really, that everybody seemed to realize that we like Gyllenhaal best when he’s anywhere from a little to a lot unhinged. Look at even movies like Zodiac, Prisoners, or Nocturnal Animals, three films where Gyllenhaal plays fairly traditional types of roles (a reporter, a cop, a besieged family man); all three of those performances have an obsessive, twitchy quality to them. You can decide for yourselves whether the performances are all successful (for my money, two of the three are), but he is clearly much more comfortable and memorable playing to these characters’ strangeness.
And so we sit here and endure the Southpaws and Demolitions and all the other movies where Hollywood continues to try and mold Jake Gyllenhaal into the leading man he’s not rather than enjoying the hell out of a movie like Okja that lets him be exactly who we want him to be: a deeply weird and unsettling former Bubble Boy.
