Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wander’ on Amazon Prime, in Which Aaron Eckhart Loses His Mind Among Crazy Conspiracy Theories

Now on Amazon Prime, Wander pairs up two former Two-Faces in Aaron Eckhart and Tommy Lee Jones, who play hermit-loner pals with a podcast (which pretty much describes 99 percent of all existing podcasts). These weirdos go on and on about the Illuminati and secret underground tunnels and UFOs like the mad tinfoil-hatters they are — with nary a mention of political pedophile cabals and the like, it’s worth mentioning. So consider the movie refreshingly old-school in its portrayal of delusional paranoia, and it hopefully provides a satisfying escape from the current era of mainstream wackjob Trumpist conspiracy theories.

WANDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The camera rolls down the double-yellow line of a hardscrabble desert highway to an overturned truck. WANDER TOWN LIMIT reads a nearby sign. A distraught woman crawls from the wreck and hustles up the road. Electronic beeping mingles with her anguished cries and POP, she falls down dead, blood seeping from her chest. There seems to be nobody for miles. It’s as if a sniper shot her right through the heart.

Elsewhere in a nearby godforsakenly beautiful desert patch, Arthur Bretnik (Eckhart) lives in a battered trailer with his dog and several bottles of prescription pills. He’s one of those constant-state-of-paranoia, thinks-he’s-always-being-watched movie characters — you know, eyes wide, needs a shower, scraggly beard, flecks of spittle on his lips. There’s a reason he’s this way: Some time ago, an auto accident killed his young daughter and left his wife in a vegetative state. He used to be a homicide detective, and now he’s a mess, limping around in his cowboy boots and sweating through his teeth. He visits his blank-eyed wife, then earns a little scratch by P.I.’ing an insurance fraudster for his lawyer friend Shelley (Heather Graham).

Arthur’s pal Jimmy (Jones) comes over to broadcast their conspiratorial ramblings on the internet, as they frequently do. They take a live call from the mother of the woman who was killed in the opening scene. She wants Arthur to investigate what happened to her daughter, and she’ll pay him $10,000. So he rolls together as many of his marbles as he can find and drives his old junker Plymouth Volare to Wander, where he’s immediately pulled over by the suspicious sheriff, one of the first, and least-weird, of the many things that happen to him in this little town. Meanwhile, he’s haunted by visions of his dead daughter and plagued by nightmares of the accident that ruined his life. Will this investigation allow him to Work Through Some Stuff? And what are the chances that the mysterious shenanigans happening in Wander are directly related to that Stuff? Pretty high, I’d say.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Re: that WANDER TOWN LIMIT sign. We haven’t seen an old-school city-limits sign in the American West since Nicolas Cage drove past that “Welcome to Red Rock” sign a comically large number of times in Red Rock West.

Performance Worth Watching: Some will praise Eckhart for his performance here, which is a, shall we say, interesting bundle of about a half-dozen crazy-guy affectations all at once. I noted how over the top he is in Wander, and how it’s the polar opposite of his unacting in I, Frankenstein, a movie you forgot existed, but that I didn’t forget existed, oh no. Anyway, I think I liked Heather Graham the best in this film, because she plays a recognizable human being and not some overexaggerated idea of a character.

Memorable Dialogue: “There are no coincidences!” — Jimmy and Arthur chant this together as if they’re of exactly one mind

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Let’s checklist Eckhart’s affectations: Gravel voice, limp, crazy eyes, shaky hands, mouth agape, twitchy. Did I get all of them? Director April Mullen reflects his agitation with a very nervous camera, which rarely stops moving and keeps looking over its shoulder for ghosts, secret agents, black helicopters or spy satellites. Is Arthur Bretnik an actual character beneath all his casual breakings-and-enterings and yelling at trains and obsessing over Big Brother microchips and shit, or is this just a collection of dated and stereotypical traits of mentally disturbed folk painted over with a veneer of high-drama trauma? It’s hard to get at the truth of the guy beneath all the hyperbole; he’s just too big to be a plausible human being struggling with mental illness.

The constant nervous state of the direction and protagonist makes Wander an exhausting watch, despite its 90-minute brevity. Scripter Tim Doiron tangles the third act with narrative loopbacks, vague socio-political assertions and enough twisty-plot tripwires to make us question whether Arthur’s perspective on reality is live or just the garbled and confused Memorex of his mind. We see things happen and can’t be sure if they’re his delusion or not, since hey, he keeps seeing his little girl over here and over there and in the backseat. Is perception reality? What do you mean by “happen,” exactly? Who’s to say that what Arthur is seeing isn’t a form of the truth? Are nefarious forces conspiring to do evil things to commonfolk? Will Arthur ever get over his loss? I have an answer to all this: Who cares.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Wander tries to be a taut thriller, but after a while, it just wears you down. I roll my eyes in its general direction.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Wander on Amazon Prime