Review: Wild (2014)

Reese Witherspoon in the hard-charging yet contemplative drama Wild.

Author's note: This is a review I let lie fallow for over two months. I saw Wild back in early January; it was one of the first films I saw in the New Year. The film has stuck with me so strongly that I would rank it among the top two or three films that I have seen in 2015 so far, along with Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, and Jennifer Kent's terrific low-budget horror film The Babadook. Thus I present to you my belated review of Wild, more or less as I wrote (but never posted) it back in January:

Wow! I just saw Jean-Marc Vallee's Wild in the theater a few weeks ago, and wow! The film really blew me away. It was intense, dramatic, and yet at the same time contemplative -- kind of like a harrowing character study in the vein of Leaving Las Vegas fused with a meditative and soulful film like Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy.

To be fair, I went into Wild expecting to like it. I enjoyed Vallee's previous film, Dallas Buyers Club, quite a bit, especially for its performances, and while that film wasn't perfect, after reading this article about the director's methods, I suspected that he would really deliver the goods on this Reese Witherspoon showcase.

Vallee's moviemaking style involves "natural lighting, a skeletal crew ready to capture spontaneous moments, and no rehearsal." 

And indeed, the goods are delivered, by crew and actors alike. Witherspoon is terrific in the lead role, playing as understated a part as I have ever seen her assay. The film, with a well-adapted screenplay by Nick Hornby, is not dialogue heavy: most of the important stuff is conveyed by Witherspoon's facial expressions and body language, or else via the film's remarkable editing and sound design. Dramatizing Cheryl Strayed's post-divorce three-month solo trek north along the Pacific Crest Trail, Wild unfolds its protagonist's back story via intermittent flashbacks, most of which involve Cheryl's relationship with her mother, played by Laura Dern. Dern gives a career-topping performance as this deeply flawed but ultimately noble (perhaps too saintly as we see her through Cheryl's eyes?) character.

As this online article argues,

Wild was one of the best American movies of the year. It was quietly revolutionary in its focus on one woman’s doggedly personal tale. It should have been a huge hit instead of a minor one, and it should have been a bigger part of the Best Picture conversation. That it wasn’t reflects some unhappy truths about the way the academy, and Hollywood at large, view women’s stories.

Just so. I have discussed the unequal representation of women in Hollywood before, so won't retread that ground here, but I must say that I am really bowled over by the lack of awards-season attention Wild is getting. It is head-and-shoulders a better movie than The Imitation Game and I also strongly suspect that it is better than The Theory of Everything even though I haven't seen that one.*

It may be that both gender inequities AND generic expectations play a role in Wild's seeming lack of cultural cachet (and Oscar noms) relative to its more formulaic contemporaries. Surely Mr. Turner suffers from the same problem, being a biopic that doesn't really feel anything like a standard biopic. Both Wild and Turner zero in on a brief period in their respective subjects' lives, dropping the viewer into the period quite dramatically in medias res. No complicated backstory or explanation of the character's earlier days is given. No subtitles whisk us through a montage of the character growing up, going to school, etc.

That said, Wild does, like its protagonist, fixate upon the figure of Cheryl's lost mother, thereby illuminating aspects of Cheryl's earlier life -- but all from her own (volatile, fragmented) point of view. The film's jumpy flashback structure makes it feel more like a thriller at times than a typical "life story" type biopic.

The film's subjective, thrillerish edge is complimented by Witherspoon's hard-charging performance as Cheryl. Kathleen Karlyn has written about the ambivalence at the core of Witherspoon's star persona and onscreen roles, an uncompromising feminist unruliness perhaps best embodied in her performance of Tracy Flick in 1999's Election.** I teach this film to undergraduate Film Theory students every semester and it never fails to elicit at least a few reactionary responses from viewers (mostly young men) who see Tracy as the despicable villain of the piece. These students usually don't quite "get" the darkly comic and ironic tone of Election or pick up on its critique of Matthew Broderick's under-achieving Jim McAllister. Many students miss that Witherspoon's portrayal of Flick exposes "the anxieties women with ambition, intelligence, and drive raise in men struggling to redefine masculinity in the postfeminist age."***

Reese Witherspoon threatens Matthew Broderick's masculinity in Election (1999).

Films about complex, ambivalent, nuanced, non-stereotypical women are going to feel unusual and confrontational and uncomfortable to many of us at first, conditioned as we are to the norms of patriarchal cinema and culture. Witherspoon's gutsy portrayal of an imperfect female character in Wild is just the kind of thing we need more of in Hollywood.

If I have any critique of Wild at all, it is that two of the men Cheryl encounters in her travels are portrayed as backwoods hicks and potential rapists, and while I understand that the film is based on a real-life memoir, I still felt uneasy about the Deliverance-style vilification of rural folk in those scenes. Framing them as sinister hicks seemed an easy way to get us to fear them, and I wonder if the real-life Cheryl Strayed's memory of these two is exaggerated or condensed in some way in the book and/or film versions. Yet that uncertainty, which comes from delving deep into character subjectivity, is one of the great strengths of this (or almost any) movie. Wild dares to show us a character at her rawest and most incomprehensible to herself, depicting in vivid yet imperfect detail the grief process of a woman we may not completely like. Wild tells the story of someone who may not be fully aware of some of the ways in which she is privileged (and her resistance to the word "hobo" is genuinely hilarious). Yet finally Wild depicts the story of a person in transition, a person making discoveries about herself as we watch and participate. It is exhilarating.  

Wild is something unique and special, a woman's journey through grief depicted with visual richness, dramatic intensity, and narrative virtuosity. The sound design alone is worth the price of admission. Reese Witherspoon, one of Hollywood's finest actors, is in top form here, giving an emotionally wrenching, go-for-broke, yet atypically restrained performance. Whatever its small faults or rough edges, Wild surely represents an artistic high point for all involved.

To sum up: see this movie.

Quebecois director Jean-Marc Vallee. What a badass. 

UPDATE 2/7/2016:  Please check out this excerpt from this wonderful roundtable interview in which Reese Witherspoon addresses the sexism implicit in the Academy's failure to recognize Wild -- or any other female-led films -- in 2014:

It was really interesting how well received [Wild] was and how well it did. It was one of the highest reviewed movies of the year last year not in Oscar consideration at all for best picture. At the time I was like, ‘Okay, it’s one of the best reviewed films of the year, but it’s not one of the top 10.’ It’s hard. I looked and was like, ‘Are any of the top-10 movies starring women?’ None.

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* Both these films suffer from the "formulaic biopic" problem -- The Imitation Game, despite its interesting and powerful subject matter and superbly executed central performance, is edited, directed, and scored like a shitty assed Lifetime movie, and its formal clunkiness hinders, even mars the material. [UPDATE 3/27/2015: To be fair, the biopic is not a genre I am typically drawn to and I may have a lackluster appreciation for its conventions.]
** Karlyn, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers (U. Texas Press, 2010) p. 128.
*** Karlyn, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers p. 139-40.

Review: Nebraska (2013)

Bruce Dern as Woody in Alexander Payne's amazing, downbeat comedy Nebraska.

I saw Alexander Payne's latest film, Nebraska, a couple of weeks ago, and I was blown away. It was completely delightful and satisfying, definitely the most enjoyable filmgoing experience I have had in quite some time. I was utterly enchanted the whole way through. With the exception of one extraordinarily minor hiccup, to which I will return, the film was flawless. I strongly suspect that Bruce Dern's lead performance was the best performance by a Hollywood film actor last year.*

Up until I saw Nebraska, I would have said that director Payne's best film (by a long shot) was 1999's Election, a razor-sharp, expertly wrought satire starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Election is one of my all-time favorite comedies, and while it technically did not make my (arbitrary and bullshittish) top 40 films list back in November, it probably should have.

In addition to Election, I would single out Citizen Ruth (1996), another hilarious and intelligent satire, as the other standout entry in Payne's body of work, which also includes such films as Sideways (2004), About Schmidt (2002), and The Descendants (2011). Of those three, the latter is my favorite, though I think it is a bit lopsided and uneven: Descendants starts out foregrounding the voice and point of view of the youngest daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), but then shifts partway through to become exclusively focused upon Matt (George Clooney) and, to a lesser degree, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley). What happened to Scottie's interesting point of view? It just inexplicably fades away, to the film's ultimate detriment.

Despite these potential weaknesses, however, I still found The Descendants to be much more rich, interesting, compelling, and character-driven than either Sideways or About Schmidt. I just did not click with Sideways and have never understood its (cult) popularity. I liked Thomas Hayden Church's performance in it but little else; the movie struck me as an overdramatic paean to white masculinity, and while I assume it was intended as satire, the satirical elements just did not land for me, so it felt overwrought and false. About Schmidt is Payne's most uneven and aimless film, a tale about an aged retiree (Jack Nicholson) who goes on a road trip for some reason I cannot now recall. In retrospect, thematically at least, Schmidt feels like an early dry run for the vastly superior Nebraska.

Nebraska is simply pitch-perfect, with superb casting and memorable, funny, and moving performances by all its principle cast members: Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Bob Odenkirk, and longtime personal favorite Stacy Keach. Dern's Woody is cantankerous and crusty, but not in the stereotypical or predictable ways you might imagine. What slowly comes out over the course of the film, always subtly, never with a heavy hand, are the ways in which Woody has suffered, yes, but also the ways he has found to be consistently generous and loving toward those around him. Similarly, what at first appears to be a cliched, antagonistic relationship between Woody and his domineering wife Kate (Squibb) is revealed (slowly and surely) to be a relationship of surprising depth and largely unexpressed yet palpable tenderness. Kate's last scene in the film is one of the most touchingly rendered moments of love I have seen in any film for many years.

In a movie full of knockout performances, Dern and Forte sparkle 
as Nebraska's central odd couple. 

Although the film sports many top-notch supporting performances -- Odenkirk, for example, is perfect as the taciturn yet not quite prickly older brother -- Nebraska mainly belongs to Dern and Forte, who make a wonderful road-movie odd couple. I am not familiar with Forte's prior work on SNL, but he shines here as a patient, hangdog, and ultimately quite noble younger son who goes the extra mile (literally and figuratively) to learn more about what makes his verbally reticent father tick. Forte's David is our onscreen proxy, he makes Woody accessible to us, and his droopy, melancholy eyes alone are enough to draw us in and make us feel for this somewhat drifting and lost soul. Despite his initial exasperation with Woody's antics, it turns out that David needs his father at least as much as the latter needs him; aiding Woody in his quest to reach Lincoln, Nebraska helps David get focused on what really matters to him, which is his family ties.

Lest I have made Nebraska sound too heavy or sappy, it isn't; in fact, it is one of the most wry and funny movies I have seen in years, and Payne's funniest since Election. It is mainly a comedy that periodically drifts into dramatic territory, but always with subtlety and a light touch. Even in its serious moments it is more nostalgic and wistful than melodramatic. Between its brilliantly paced script and beautiful black and white cinematography, Nebraska ultimately evokes a deep appreciation for how the past, while far from being a trap we cannot escape from, nevertheless shapes every aspect of who we are in the present. The Grant family -- largely, it turns out, through Kate's agency -- have escaped the stultifying mire of small-town life in Hawthorne, Nebraska and have moved on, yet, as the film shows, revisiting and remembering where they came from gives them unique and crucial insights into how they interrelate (or have failed to interrelate) in their new life in Billings, Montana.

If Nebraska has one flaw, it is in how it handles one single moment in one of its climatic scenes. I will keep this review spoiler-free, but suffice to say that I would have liked to see David handle his final confrontation with Ed Pegram (Keach) a wee bit differently. Although the audience I saw the film with gave subdued cheers and applause during that scene as it is, I would have liked to see a little more restraint exercised in that scene; it felt like the one moment in the whole film that might be tonally out of step with the whole.

But that is a minor quibble about a film that is surely Payne's best movie to date and also one of the best films of last year. Had I seen Nebraska early enough, before I wrote my end-of-2013 roundup, it would have been discussed alongside 12 Years a Slave and Spring Breakers as one of my very favorite films of 2013. I simply cannot recommend it highly enough -- it is everything that great, moving, delightful, thoughtful, humanist cinema should be. The American cinema -- and the world -- would be a better and more enjoyable place if there were more beautifully crafted, funny, and subtly profound films like this one.**

Probably the most hilarious supporting characters in Nebraska are these two 

ne'er-do-well cousins of David's. "Three days!!"

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* Though I have no critical respect for the Academy Awards -- since they primarily measure which mediocre films of the past year conducted the best behind-the-scenes Oscar campaigns -- I am nevertheless using them as a yardstick here, and since I have not yet seen McConaughey's Oscar-winning performance in Dallas Buyer's Club, I feel I should not unequivocally declare Dern's performance the best one. But I have a feeling that Mr. Dern was unjustly robbed at the Oscars.
** One reason (among many) there needs to be more films like Nebraska is due to its focus on the lives and concerns of older people. There are so few good films addressing that demographic, and to get such a funny and revealing peek into the lives of characters like Woody and Kate is an all-too-rare treat seldom to be found in Hollywood's youth-obsessed fare.