She now works as a waitress in a steak house and is trying to walk the straight and narrow, and as they rekindle their bond, Wilson learns that the child he thought she’d aborted was, in fact, given up for adoption. When Wilson’s father dies, and his one and only friend moves away, the isolation begins to close in on him, so he hunts down his ex-wife, Pippi (Laura Dern), a former drug addict and prostitute who left him 17 years ago. But then, as the movie goes on, it’s all too willing to leave plausibility behind. It’s a sign of the movie’s stylized goofy lightness that we never hear even two words about how Wilson survives (he has no job, but seems to feed himself and his dog and pay his rent with no problem). Once you do, though, it strings you along in its pleasant absurdist way. Movies based on graphic novels don’t need to be superficial just look at “American Splendor,” in which Harvey Pekar was a bohemian grouch with attitudes a lot like Wilson’s, but Paul Giamatti endowed him with a streak of vulnerability. Watching “Wilson,” you have to accept that the movie is a kind of a cartoon character study (Harrelson is good, but he never drops his guard). (If this were 100 years ago, he’s be griping about cars and telephones.) All of which is to say that in “Wilson,” Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated. In truth, though, he sounds like an aging cranky white male whose arbitrary complaints boil down to the world no longer being the one that he grew up in. The hook of Wilson’s personality is that he’s an oddball-outsider who cuts through the bull. He’s not dim, but he’s stuck in a soggy bubble of fraying boomer insights: technology is bad, hanging out is good, corporate homogenization is bad, saying whatever comes into your head with no filter is good. If suburb-bashing sounds a little…I don’t know, 1985 to you, then welcome to Wilson’s world. But Wilson tends to say things like “Aren’t you a little old to be doing all that computer stuff?” or “Why the hell do people move to the suburbs? It’s like a living death.” If his observations were actually interesting, then maybe the people he was talking to wouldn’t look like they were being assaulted. He’ll subject them to one of his critiques of everything that’s wrong with society, which he spins out with a kind of brash autodidactic literacy. Wilson lives with his dog in a cruddy apartment stacked with old paperbacks, and when he’s out on the street, he’ll go up to a stranger and commence an eager-beaver “conversation,” paying no heed to how little his company is desired.
The character is played, with a jaunty lack of self-pity, by Woody Harrelson, who wears horn-rims, a graying beard, and a nerd’s practical wardrobe (plaid shirt, Dockers).
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