"Man staggers through life yapped by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by his fears, beckoned by his hopes, small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting."
— E. B. White
Wakefield is based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne which was then shaped by novelist E.L. Doctorow into a dramedy about the midlife crisis of a married man. Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) is a lawyer whose commute home one night causes him a great deal of fear and trembling. He is rocked by two incidents: The power goes out on the train and he experiences a close encounter with a raccoon. These strange happenings lead him to make a detour from his house and a decision to drop out by hiding in the attic of his garage.
In the voice-over narration, Howard reveals that he realizes this self-imposed exile from his wife Diana (Jennifer Garner) and twin daughters will both mystify and hurt them. He willingly confronts a series of wild emotions as he looks out the attic's small window into several rooms of his suburban home. The roles of lawyer, husband, and father have become quite a burden for Howard. And so he lays all of them down.
Through a series of flashbacks we witness his meeting Diana, a dancer who is dating his friend Dirk (Jason O'Mara); he slyly finds a way to win her away and capture her heart. The director and co-writer of the screenplay, Robin Swicord (The Jane Austen Book Club), draws out an engrossing performance from Bryan Cranston. There are some funny sequences in which Howard, the voyeur, ridicules the various moves men are putting on Diana as she genuinely struggles with the loss of her husband.
As time goes on, Howard's retreat from reality grows darker as he shuttles around in grubby clothes and grows a long wild beard. The winter months are particularly arduous in the cold garage. His mental deterioration grows as he scavenges for food in dumpsters.
A little self-forgetting is a good spiritual exercise now and then, but we wonder whether Howard will ever make it back home and, if he does, what he will have learned about his life.