19 Ocak 2015 Pazartesi
Now playing at a multiplex near you:
AMERICAN SNIPER (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014)
With several sequences dealing with a soldier having trouble adjusting to civilian life after intense tours in Iraq, this film often feels like Clint Eastwood’s THE HURT LOCKER.
But the crusty but lovable filmmaker, who’s 34th film as director this is, obviously feels he has bigger fish to fry here than that film’s “war is a drug” theme.
AMERICAN SNIPER, Eastwood’s new biopic of Chris Kyle (1974-2013), the late Navy SEAL who from 1999 to 2009 racked up the most career sniper kills (over 160 confirmed enemy kills) in U.S. military history, wants to both pay tribute to the man as a modern war hero, and provide a platform for his redemption as a murderer.
It’s not entirely successful in those goals, but it’s Eastwood’s best film as director since 2008’s GRAN TORINO, proving that the man is much better at capturing combat than maneuvering through the tried and true tropes of musical biopics (see last year’s ultra trivial JERSEY BOYS).
In a performance that’s worthy of the Oscar nomination he scored this week, a beefed up Bradley Cooper plays Kyle, who we follow from being a good ole boy Texas ranch hand and rodeo cowboy to becoming a celebrated Army rifleman whose fellow Navy SEALS called “The Legend.”
Cooper’s Kyle, a vessel of extreme patriotism, spends four dangerous tours of duty in Iraq, where we see him mostly stationed on rooftops providing cover for the troops below. In one central scene, which the film opens on then comes back to later in the narrative, Kyle weighs whether or not to shoot an Iraqi woman and a young boy, after seeing in his site that they were about to lob a grenade at a group of Marines on the street.
This is an intense, defining scene, one that TV spots for the film use as a cliffhanger (will he/won't he shoot? - see the movie and find out), and it is effective, but like the movie itself, it doesn't plow that deep into Kyle's character.
Kyle, who constantly calls the Islamist insurgents “savages,” does appear, in fleeting bits of dialogue, to be strongly in favor of the Iraq war, but the film itself is fairly ambiguous about it.
Kyle’s camaraderie with his fellow SEAL team members, who include Luke Grimes, Kyle Gallner, and Jake McDorman, is familiar feeling but still necessary material in the mix, possibly giving the most insight into what the film thinks the guy was like.
When Kyle is stateside between deployments with his wife Tara (Sienna Miller) and kids, he has the expected trouble adjusting to civilian life, but the aforementioned THE HURT LOCKER went through these motions much more effectively; here it’s way too spelled out.
There’s an action movie drive, which the film is really more about, to Kyle and his team’s hunt for an Al Qaeda terrorist named “The Butcher” (German-Egyptian actor Mido Hamada), and an enemy Syrian sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), in which we're simply watching a good guys vs. bad guys scenario with noisy shoot-outs and chases. All compellingly shot by Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer Tom Stern.
The big climatic battle, taking place on our lead’s fourth and final tour, has Kyle and his unit surrounded by terrorists as a sandstorm approaches. It’s truly exciting stuff, a sequence that proves how much pure machismo Eastwood can still muster at his late age.
Sure, the film hugely oversimplifies, making combat look like a video game at times, and it won't satisfy the folks who are complaining about its supposed pro-war stance, but it falls in line with what Eastwood has been saying cinematically his entire career. Consider that his iconic Dirty Harry character was considered by many to be “fascist” back in the day.
In a way Eastwood's film, via Jason Hall's screenplay adaptation of Kyle's 2012 autobiography, is like the protagonist's phone calls home to his wife; it’s tight-lipped about what’s really going down on in the guy’s mind.
It basically seems to come down to saying this guy believed in what he was doing for his country, but he was a little conflicted by it. That may anger folks who feel that the real-life Kyle had no remorse over his killings and cite passages that say as much in his book, but, for me, the movie version of Kyle never wrote a book.
That is, like all the other films that are based on true stories out there, especially the ones that are Oscar nominated, AMERICAN SNIPER shouldn’t be taken as fact. Moviegoers going in should just ignore all the pundits and think pieces, and just take it as an old fashioned war movie with a smidgen of new school conscience that features an invested, career best performance by Cooper carrying one of Eastwood’s most well constructed productions.
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12 Ocak 2015 Pazartesi
Now playing at a multiplex near you:
SELMA (Dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014)
Despite the accusations of inaccuracies, Ava DuVernay’s SELMA is the only 2014 film based on true events that ought to be mandatory viewing. As in, kids should be dragged to it, it should be shown in schools, etc.
SELMA’s stirring depiction of one of the most important episodes in civil rights history, the civil rights protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, provides a profoundly powerful lesson about how people can pull together to rise above oppression.
It’s a timeless lesson, especially given the similarities to the protests and riots that have resulted from the fatal shooting of 18-year old African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer, that hammers home philosopher and cultural critic George Santayana’s famous saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Although the bulk of the film concerns the campaign to secure equal voting rights in 1965, SELMA begins with a few scenes set in the years leading up to that period.
First, we see Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) preparing his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The legendary civil rights leader’s wife Coretta Scott (Carmen Ejogo) helps him with his tie in this backstage glimpse which shows him as a vulnerable, nervous man, not an unflappable icon.
Then, first-time screenwriter Paul Webb’s narrative takes us back to 1963, when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls. Even if you know your history, the scene is a shocking sight; one that won’t soon fade from memory.
Those who don’t know their history may be confused by the chronology, but from this point on – that is, after King’s meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) in the Oval Office in December, 1965 – the film focuses on the tumultuous three-month movement in early ’65.
Wilkinson’s LBJ tells Oyelow’s MLK Jr. that because of a hundred other problems – Vietnam, poverty, Medicare, immigration reform, etc. - “This voting thing is just going to have to wait.”
Nonplussed, MLK Jr. travels to Selma to get the ball rolling with the help of of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which included such members as Andrew Young (Andre Holland), Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), Reverend James Bevel (Common), , James Orange (Omar Dorsey), Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce) and Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint).
Meanwhile, LBJ deals with J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) who wants to discredit King, and becomes furious that Alabama Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth) has vowed to stop the march.
A violent scuffle in Selma, in which Oprah Winfrey (one of the film's producers) as Annie Lee Cooper, a hospice nurse who had previously tried several times to register to vote, punches ultra racist Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston), leads to King and many of his people getting arrested.
The violence escalates when state troopers attack activists on a night march, and Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) gets shot and killed by one of the police.
But the most devastating incident of the entire movement, and one of the most searing sequences on film of this last year, is undoubtedly the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation, in which 600 marchers were attacked by Alabama police and angry posses who tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.
The massacre as it intensely unfolds can be hard to watch, but Duvernay’s cut-aways to folks’ horrified reactions – most notably LBJ’s - as they watch it on grainy black and white television sets – got me so caught up in the outrage that is was impossible to look away.
SELMA gets so much right in its portrayal of the passion of the protesters in the face of the severe stakes involved, that the quibbles about its mischaracterization of LBJ’s motivations are seriously misplaced.
In real life, LBJ wasn’t as hesitant to introduce a voting rights bill as shown in the film, but the film hardly depicts him as a villain. Wilkinson (who like Oyellow is British) brings a stressed-out air to the role, something he’s used to great effect in a great many movies playing morally questionable characters, but here the notion is that he’s a politician first and foremost.
This can still be seen as a flaw in the film’s framework, as are a few moments that are wrapped in melodrama, but not one that takes away from the heart pounding impact of this excellent epic.
Oyelowo, a name that everybody should learn, is sure to get an Oscar nomination for his amazing performance as MLK. He brings a gravitas to King that I’ve not seen him muster before, particularly when compared to his role as the subversive son of THE BUTLER just last year. Oyelowo doesn’t really resemble King, but he successfully channels him in both the quiet, troubled moments behind the scenes, and the famous, powerfully moving speeches we’ve all heard throughout our lives.
Cinematographer Bradford Young is also certain to get award season action for greatly giving the imagery what he called in an interview a “period, Kodachrome-esque look.” (If Young isn’t nominated for an Oscar for this then his superb work in J.C. Chandor’s A MOST VIOLENT YEAR will certainly get a nod).
The touching, timely SELMA is the best historical drama of 2014. It’s unfortunate that its story is still strongly such a necessary one to pass down, but even without recent events, it’s one that should be forever told.
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8 Ocak 2015 Perşembe
Opening today at an indie art house near me:
INHERENT VICE
(Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
In a recent interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson claimed he wasn’t a stoner, that he really didn’t get stoned.
Well, INHERENT VICE, Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 comic-noir novel of the same name, coulda fooled me.
It’s such a rambling, sprawling, shaggy dog story with a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous as The Dude would say, all filtered through hazy clouds of pot smoke that it feels like it could’ve only been made by a filmmaker who’s stoned out of his mind.
Of course, my mention of The Dude doesn’t come from out of the blue. The film’s depiction of a countercultural underdog unraveling connections throughout the seedy underworld of Los Angeles heavily recalls the Coen brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), as well as Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973).
Pynchon’s novel seemed to have those references embedded in it as well, and Anderson puts forth a largely faithful take on the original source material, right down to the exact wording of large chunks of the book’s dialogue.
In his second film for Anderson following 2012’s THE MASTER, Joaquin Phoenix plays pothead protagonist Larry “Doc” Sportello, a long-haired, unkempt sideburns-sporting private investigator living in Gordita Beach, California in 1970. Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta (the pretty and appropriately flighty Katherine Waterson) shows up after an absence of over a year, and asks him for his help concerning her current boyfriend, a real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts).
Mickey’s wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover, are working on what Shasta calls “a creepy little scheme” to have her rich husband committed to a mental institution so that they can make off with his fortune.
From there, Phoenix’s Doc gets hired by The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams as a member of the “Black Guerilla Family” gang to find a white supremacist, named Glenn Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who happens to be one of Mickey’s bodyguards.
After following a lead that ends up with our extremely high hero getting knocked unconscious at a Massage parlor named Chick Planet, Doc is questioned by his long-time cop nemesis, Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin, going big and succeeding), a thick-necked, flat-topped, hippie-hating hardass member of the LAPD.
Luckily, Benicio Del Toro as slick marine lawyer Sauncho Smilax swoops in to get Doc released, but, unluckily, Shasta and Mickey have completely disappeared into thin air.
As if things weren’t complicated enough, Doc takes on another case that’s possibly related, involving the death of surf-rock saxophonist Coy Harlingen (a whispering Owen Wilson) as his widow Hope (Jena Malone) thinks he’s still alive.
From there, Doc visits with his special lady friend, Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball, played by Phoenix’s WALK THE LINE co-star Reese Witherspoon, gets interrogated by FBI agents (Parenthood’s Sam Jaeger and Veep’s Timothy Simons), and, most amusingly, does cocaine with Martin Short as an coked-up dentist. Doc’s trail keeps leading to some sinister entity called “Golden Fang,” which is either a mysterious ship for running drugs, an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel, and/or a syndicate of dentists. I’m still not sure which.
Making her film debut, indie singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom serve as the film’s onscreen narrator Sortilège, a minor character in the book but here the custodian to descriptions of Doc’s inner thoughts, somewhat surreally I might add.
Which means that one minute, Doc is driving with Sortilège riding shotgun telling us about “the long, sad history of LA land use,” and the next minute she’s gone. The freshness of Newsom's delivery of Pynchon's prose enhances the dry sections of the film considerably.
The fading of the sunny idealistic ‘60s into the scary, smacked out ‘70s is conveyed strikingly through Robert Elswit’s always stunning cinematography (Elswit has shot 6 of Anderson’s 7 movies), which gives both dark, dank interiors and sun-bleached exteriors a great burnt-out look, and the score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood mixed with well chosen songs by Neil Young, Can, Lex Baxter, and the Chuck Jackson Motown classic “Any Day Now,” perfectly evokes the era as well.
Unfortunately INHERENT VICE is no masterpiece. It’s frustratingly low energy at times with scenes that linger on and on. Many critics are calling it “incoherent vice” (there’s a joke I bet will be made at the Oscars) for understandable reasons, but while I sometimes stared at the screen and thought that it was a meandering mess, I was more often struck by the brilliance of many of its moments.
I’ve seen it twice now, and I enjoyed and “got it” a lot more the second time. Phoenix's performance, which initially bothered me as being half-assed, seemed more nuanced (I could see that he was really using his full ass), and I felt more of a poetry to its slow pace than before.
Being the first ever adaptation of a Pynchon novel – books that many have said are unfilmable - is no small feat, and I can’t imagine anybody doing a better job with this particular material than Anderson.
Folks who aren’t Anderson or Pynchon fans going in aren’t likely to be won over, especially at its long-ass length of 2 and a half hours, but those who are hip to its vibe and can get into a groove with its stoned tone are likely to think it’s a gas, man. Sorry, to lay that outdated lingo on you, but I bet deep down you dig it.
More later...
4 Ocak 2015 Pazar
Film fans, and in particular fans of film criticism, should take note that Steve James' excellent 2014 documentary LIFE ITSELF airs tonight on CNN.
The documentary, one of my favorite films of the last year, takes a loving look at the life of movie critic legend Roger Ebert, who passed in 2013 after a 10-year battle with thyroid cancer.
Read my review of the insightful, funny, and profoundly touching biodoc from when it ran theatrically in my neck of the woods (at the Colony Theater in Raleigh last summer):
LIFE ITSELF: The Film Babble Blog Review (7/19/14)
Also check out writer/critic extraordinaire Matt Zoller Seitz, who among many credits is editor-in-chief at rogerebert.com, discussing the documentary on a segment that aired yesterday on CNN.
Finally, if you're somehow not convinced to watch the film about the incredibly influential writer and personality yet, here's the trailer:
Airing as an installment in the CNN Presents series, LIFE ITSELF airs this evening at 9 pm.
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26 Aralık 2014 Cuma
Now playing at an indie art house (and some multiplexes) near me:
This historical biopic is the perfect storm of a holiday season prestige picture.
It’s got the ‘true story of a hero who triumphed against all odds’ scenario. It takes place during World War II. In Benedict Cumberbatch, it stars an A-list leading man that people haven’t gotten sick of yet. It’s got Keira Knightley. It’s got a distinguished supporting cast. It’s got a sweeping score by acclaimed composer Alexandre Desplat. It’s being distributed by the Weinstein Company.
Yeah, it’s got Academy Award fodder written all over it.
But wait, for Morten Tyldum’s THE IMITATION GAME, which tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who cracked a German code helping to win WWII, is a much livelier, wittier, and all around more entertaining piece of Oscar bait than just about anything else in the current crop of contenders.
Especially when it’s compared to James Marsh’s bland Stephen Hawking biopic THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, or Bennett Miller’s unengaging FOXCATCHER.
Turing’s tale is told through flashbacks to the late ‘30s through the mid ‘40s from the vantage point of the early ‘50s when the police, in particular Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear), are investigating a suspicious burglary of Turing’s home in Manchester, England.
This is where we first meet Cumberbatch’s Turing, who comes across like a blend of his own Sherlock Holmes, with Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, and Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory in his amusingly heightened arrogance about his superior intelligence.
After Detective Nock sizes Turing up as an “insufferable sod” who may be hiding something, the film flashbacks to 1939 London right as war is being declared on Germany. The 27 year old Turing, then a Cambridge undergraduate in mathematics, is recruited by Britain’s top secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to be part of a team of the country’s top cryptographers to try to crack the Germans' “Enigma” code.
Turing considers the code “the most difficult problem in the world” and is determined to solve it, not caring about alienating his colleagues, which include Matthew Goode, Allen Leech, and Matthew Beard, or pissing off his superiors, which include Charles Dance as a highly irritated British Commander and Mark Strong as the icy head of MI-6, with his methods.
Through a newspaper crossword puzzle competition, a young woman named Joan Clarke, played pristinely by Keira Knightley comes aboard the project, and goes on to have a close relationship with Turing, despite the fact that he's a homosexual.
The film skip seamlessly skips back and forth from wartime to the investigation of Turing in the '50s (even including some flashbacks within flashbacks of when our protagonist was a school boy), even making space for some WWII footage (maybe its most unnecessary element - I mean, we have the History Channel for that), with a very pleasing pace.
Many have pointed out that this film, which is based on Andrew Hodges' 1992 biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” takes a lot of liberties with the facts concerning what really went down at Bletchley Park.
I.e. the real life Turing didn't singlehandedly invent and build the machine that broke the code, he didn't name the machine Christopher after his first lover, the police didn't uncover Turing's homosexuality while investigating him for being a possible Soviet spy, Turing didn't have any contact with the actual Soviet spy John Cairncross (played by Leech) who's depicted in the film as threatening to expose Turing's homosexuality if he blows his cover, and Turing wasn't a cold humorless robot who wouldn't understand an invitation to lunch.
But despite these fabrications, or possibly because of them, the film is a rousing experience with a compelling narrative drive. Graham Moore's elegantly written screenplay makes the biopic formula feel fresh again, and power and passion that Tyldum brings to telling Turing's noble story can be felt in every frame. So much so that its abundance of inaccuracies can be forgiven as conventions created for dramatic effect.
The fine performances by Cumberbatch, Knightley (this sure makes up for LAGGIES), and their fellow thespians are no small part of how well this machine of a movie works as well.
THE IMITATION GAME will undoubtedly and deservedly get major award season action, but don't dismiss it because it so blatantly looks like it was designed just for that. It's a thoroughy engrossing introduction for movie goers to the basics of why Turing is incredibly important to our modern world, but folks who see it should really do a little reading up on the man too.
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25 Aralık 2014 Perşembe
THE INTERVIEW
(Dirs. Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen, 2014)
You may have heard that after all of the hubbub surrounding Sony pulling the release of the new Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy THE INTERVIEW about assassinating Kim Jong-un, the studio reversed its decision to a degree.
Yesterday the film started streaming on a bunch of on demand services - YouTube Movies, Google Play, Microsoft's Xbox Video and via SeeTheInterview.com. (The cost is $5.99 to rent, and $14.99 to purchase) – and today, Christmas Day, it will be released in over 200 select theaters across the country.
Last night I rented the film and watched it on YouTube, and for better or worse it’s pretty much what I expected: a silly, raunchy farce that doesn’t care about having any political bite. It’s only concerned about getting big laughs, and it does achieve that albeit somewhat intermittently.
There are lots of amusing moments in the film’s set-up involving Franco as Dave Skylark, a Ryan Seacrest-style talk show host of a popular celebrity tabloid talk show (“Skylark Tonight”), whose producer Aaron Rapoport (Rogen) is constantly embarrassed by.
But even early on it’s pretty hit or miss material: a cameo by Eminem as himself casually coming out as gay to Franco on air is funny (“I’m more shocked more people haven’t figured it out yet; I mean it’s kind of like I’ve been playing gay peek-a-boo”), less so is Rob Lowe, also as himself, revealing that he’s been wearing a toupee since the ‘80s (a lame gag spoiled by TV spots and trailers).
Anyway, in an attempt to be taken more seriously, Franco and Rogen pursue and obtain an exclusive interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un after hearing he’s a fan of their show. After a night of partying on ecstasy (a thankfully brief scene), they are approached by CIA agents (Lizzy Caplan and Reese Alexander) who wish to turn their once-in-lifetime interview opportunity into an assassination mission.
So Franco and Rogen travel to Pyongyang, North Korea with the plan of poisoning the evil leader with a delayed action ricin-strip that Franco will apply via shaking hands.
As you will probably guess, their first attempt goes screwy (a guard chews the strip thinking it’s a stick of gum), so Franco and Rogen get their CIA contacts to have a drone drop-ship them more deadly strips. Rogen has to slip out in the middle of the night to retrieve the package and is almost killed by a Bengal Tiger, then is captured by a team of guards. Luckily he is able to conceal the metal mini missile they dropped by hiding it, uh, up his butt (Franco: “You got fucked by Robocop, dude!”).
While Rogen is still committed to the plan, Franco goes off track by beginning a full throttle bromance with Kim (comedy veteran Randall Park, who appeared with Rogen in last summers’ NEIGHBORS) that has them spending a fun-filled day together playing basketball, smoking joints, jamming to Katy Perry, partying with scantily-clad ladies, blowing stuff up with one of Kim’s tanks, and bonding over how harshly their fathers treated them.
The chaotic climax apes PINEAPPLE EXPRESS it its bloated and surreal action movie hysterics, plus its use of shock value gore, but, try as it might, it can't quite match the hilarity of that far superior film.
THE INTERVIEW is more in the league of Greg Mottola’s PAUL, which featured Rogen voicing an alien who befriends Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. That 2011 film wasn’t up to the par of the Edgar Wright Pegg/Frost films that preceded it, nor the Apatow projects that helped break Franco and Rogen, but it delivered a steady stream of laughs, even if most of them were only mild chuckles.
I like that Franco put so much gusto into his part – his eyes light up with almost every line, and he actually pulls off some convincing drama in his and Park’s interview scene, but throughout it seemed like he was really trying too hard.
Rogen’s affably schlubby persona seems to be set in stone. Remember that opening bit in THIS IS THE END when somebody at the airport said to him “So, like you always play like the same guy in every movie! When you gonna do some acting?”
Seems more and more like that’s less a very self aware joke than a statement of intent.
Rogen and writing/directing partner Evan Goldberg’s work here never gets anywhere near the satirical heights of real politically charged comedy classics like THE DICTATOR or DR. STRANGELOVE, and with how purposely, and surreally, stupid it is, one will wonder if North Korea or the Sony hacks would really be offended, let alone consider it an “act of war” if they actually watched it.
I found that I enjoyed the parts of THE INTERVIEW that were somewhat grounded; it started to lose me whenever it got more outlandish. As a fan of Franco and Rogen and their stoner-toned schtick, I can’t help but feel let down by it a bit, since I felt it never fully launched itself into the zone of total hilarity. But as I got plenty of yuck yucks for my six bucks I'd say that it’s funny enough to recommend.
That is, for Franco and Rogen fans. Folks who are on the fence about them, but are curious because of the current controversy it sparked, may want to think twice about plunking down their money.
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23 Aralık 2014 Salı
In this new addition to the “becoming one with nature” genre that includes INTO THE WILD, 127 HOURS, and THE WALK, Reese Witherspoon stars as Cheryl Strayed, a writer who in 1995 alone hiked the 1,000 mile Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed, who chronicled the journey in her 2012 memoir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” was looking to wipe her spiritual slate clean after her mother's passing, and her divorce caused by her adultery and drug abuse.
The role marks a strong comeback for Witherspoon after appearing in a string of forgettable films (with the exception of MUD, that one was good) since winning the Oscar for her lovely performance as June Carter in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic WALK THE LINE.
After an opening flash forward involving an almost beaten down Witherspoon at the top of a mountain screaming in frustration, we go back to “Day 1” as a title tells us. The inexperienced hiker sets off on the trail through the Mojave Desert with a ginormous overstuffed backpack, boots that are the wrong size, and the wrong cooking gas for her portable stove. Yes, our former heroin addict heroine has a lot to learn.
Throughout Witherspoon's trip, she has many flashbacks in which we get a sense of her messy marriage (her husband is played by Thomas Sadoski who you might know as Don on the thankfully concluded HBO series The Newsroom), and get to spend some time with her mother played by Laura Dern in one of her most vital, and real feeling pieces of acting.
Being a young, pretty woman on her own, Witherspoon's Cheryl is as fearful of male strangers she encounters as she is of the treacherous elements of the wilderness. Luckily she meets mostly friendly folks such as an older couple (W. Earl Brown and Jan Hoag) who fix her up with a hot meal and a shower one night, Kevin Rankin as a helpful fellow hiker that she happens upon skinny dipping, and Michiel Huisman (Treme, Game of Thrones) who invites her to a Jerry Garcia tribute show (she winds up in the hippy-saturated town of Ashland, Oregon the day after Garcia's death in '95).
But then there are the two creepy hunters who give off an undeniable rape vibe deep in the woods in California, and the Park Ranger (Brian Van Holt) who makes something of an attempt to pick up Witherspoon, so it's not all smooth sailing (or happy hiking).
Working from a sharp, layered screenplay by Nick Hornby (HIGH FIDELITY, ABOUT A BOY, AN EDUCATION), director Vallée (DALLAS BUYER'S CLUB) gives Strayed's story immense emotional momentum. It engrossingly gets more powerful as it gets deeper into its protagonist's back story, particularly in dealing with her free spirited mother's deterioration and death from cancer.
It's not without humor either. A title that announces that it's “Day fucking 36” of the 95 day trek made me laugh out laugh, as did Mo McRae as a reporter from the Hobo Times who mistakes Witherspoon for, well, a hobo.
I've never been more affected by Witherspoon as an actress. She remoulds her squeaky clean image into an authentic feeling human being that you want to root for. I'm not sure if she deserves another Oscar for it, but it's quite an impressive performance that I bet will surprise a lot of people.
But without a doubt Dern's turn has Best Supporting Actress written all over it. Since it's been over 2 decades since she's gotten any notice from the Academy (she was nominated in '92 for RAMBLING ROSE), here's hoping her wonderful work here won't be ignored. That goes for Hornby's excellent screenwriting too.
With its vast terrain beautifully shot by cinematographer Yves Bélanger, its abundance of heartfelt acting, and its gripping portrayal of sheer determination, WILD is an heartfelt hike worth taking.
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