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Wolf: A Smart Satire that Never Answers Its Own Moral Questions

Nicholson commits to full werewolf before he's ever pressed into answering the movie's deeper moral questions.

Wolf is an old-fashioned horror movie with a sly sense of humor. Director Mike Nichols draws a metaphor here between primal wolf savagery and primal corporate savagery – the more that book editor Will Randall (Jack Nicholson) descends into his new wolf powers, the better he is able to survive the new cutthroat demands of Big Business Takeover. All well and good – that is until Will eventually realizes that his emerging wolf persona takes over at night and has him patrolling the New York City streets for fresh human prey. It’s a juicy dilemma that epitomizes the movie’s central theme: how far is Will willing to go to maintain his recent success? Is he willing to turn a blind eye to murder to keep his professional and personal comeback going on all cylinders? Is he willing to risk human lives’ in order to continue squashing the competition? What a great metaphor for the tyrants of industry.

Unfortunately, Wolf completely cops out of answering these questions – just when Will realizes his new murderous impulses, the movie launches into its rushed, clunky climax which ultimately sends our hero retreating into the woods without ever having to address any of the posed moral issues. It’s an anti-climactic resolution because we never get a chance to see Will truly embody the corporate wolf. Sure, he gets a chance to make a well-deserved comeback and justly punish the sneaky adversary (James Spader) who wronged him – but he then never takes that next step into going too far, into needlessly crushing others for the sake of advancing his own career, into compromising his humanity for the sake of being the leader of the pack, into committing literal and figurative murder in pursuit of his own advancement. Screenwriters Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick go to all this trouble to set up a central joke about the dog-eat-dog nature of the modern American workplace but then they completely forget the puncline. Truly, what is the point of Will's wolf-like ascent to the top of the pack if he never assumes the form of a true alpha leader? The movie's unfulfilled premise breeds a stalled narrative: for its 2-hour running time, Wolf really doesn't have much of a story; Randall's comeback is remarkably simple, one unencumbered by much conflict or adversity, and then this office drama is altogether dropped in favor of a barnyard showdown. If Will had become possessed to the point of running his crusade into amoral territory, however, Wolf would then come alive with additional seriocomic nuances - and it would be in a prime position to finish its drama in the same unforgiving publishing house where it originally began.

Given Wolf's current structure, Will’s final decision to go completely wolf is the result of an arbitrary need to save his romantic interest (Michelle Pfeiffer) from an entirely contrived life-or-death situation – it doesn’t reflect a building character struggle concerning the moral cost of rising to the top. How much more satisfying would this final act of selflessness feel if it came on the heels of Will realizing that he was in jeopardy of becoming the same corporate monster that had once terrorized him? If it came on the heels of Will realizing that the wolf that had built him up was now taking him down? In this context, Will’s decision to go wolf would be a direct response to the dawning awareness that the so-called "civilized" world poses much more of a moral threat than that of the animal kingdom; his ultimate decision would be the final, conscious decision of a man who has grown disgusted by his own part in alpha-brutality. In other words, it would actually pay off the movie’s established central struggle between human and monster.

Directed by: Mike Nichols
Written by: Jim Harrison & Wesley Strick
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer

July 13, 2009