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While Reese Witherspoon's filmography has eclipsed Pleasantville for some folks, her performance in the tender, meaningful dramedy is often fondly remembered - similar to how some older folks might look back and wax nostalgia about the olden days. If not, you should check out the movie, as it's a well-regard period piece with an astute message and resonant commentary. That is, until things obviously start to take a turn and everything literally doesn't become so black and white.
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If Vallee had stayed with her, sticking with the physical ordeal and suggesting the past rather than wallowing in it, this could have been a stronger movie.In Gary Ross' immersive 1998 dramedy Pleasantville, Reese Witherspoon plays Jennifer, the twin of Tobey Maguire's David, who gets trapped inside the world of a 1950s television series in which the residents are all seemingly as perfect as can be and no conflicts can be found inside their nice, tidy lives. She does that beautifully, hence the nomination for an Oscar. She is naked, bruised and gaunt here, summoning courage and focussing her will to give a performance that will do justice to Cheryl's pain. See the movie if you want to see Reese Witherspoon sloughing off glamour and the protective hard-shell of a major Hollywood actress. There isn't one film trades in different stocks. Vallee was an editor before and you can feel the tension between his desire to show Cheryl's story, and his desire to find a visual equivalent to her intense prose by repetition and layering of sound. It's like he wanted to make that movie - the urban, gritty one - rather than this epic adventure in the great, scary, humbling outdoors. It's true that Cheryl's memories of her mother's awful death have to be told, along with her terrible spin-out afterwards, but Vallee can't let them alone. And if we see this once, we see it six times, as if the director doesn't trust us to get it. If you're enjoying the mountains, the colours, the sounds of Witherspoon grunting and groaning under the weight of her impossibly large pack, it becomes irritating to flash back to scenes of Cheryl's childhood, as she and her little brother roll in the enveloping arms of their mother, more beloved than anything in the world. They dissipate the energy and tension, distracting the flow. He has also said he increased the reliance on flashbacks - and I wish he hadn't.įlashbacks usually weaken a story. He settled on mid-close-ups, tracking back and forth with her. He has said in interviews that he spent the first two weeks of shooting in the mountains trying every angle, until he found the right way to shoot Witherspoon in the act of walking (I'm wondering, how hard can that be?). Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallee ( Dallas Buyers Club) puts it together with his usual craftsmanship. There is blood, sweat and many tears, as well as vivid swearing and the odd turd on the trail. There's not a lot wrong with the movie it's involving, emotional, tough-minded and raw. Raw appeal: Reese Witherspoon stars in the film Wild. If a bear had eaten her in the first eight days - during which she saw no other humans - she would have been happy. She's running away from the death of her mother, played by the seldom-seen Laura Dern, her divorce from Paul (Thomas Sadoski) and who knows what else. Or to be accurate, she has so much grief on her back that 25 kilograms of pack makes little difference.
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New boots, no trial walks, new untried stove? If she could have made more mistakes, I don't know what they would have been, but that's part of the comedy here.Ĭheryl (Witherspoon) has more gumption than sense. Note to anyone who thinks they might like to do a similar thing: watch this movie, then do the opposite of what Reese Witherspoon does. Some 94 days and 1700 kilometres later, she stopped. She had never carried a pack, never walked long distances and didn't try out most of her gear before arriving in Mojave, in the Californian desert, her starting point. In 1995, Cheryl Strayed, then aged 26, packed her monster backpack with more than she could carry and set off to walk the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs for 4,500 kilometres through the mountains from California to Canada.
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