Tag: Reese Witherspoon

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New At The Movies: Paris, Love Triangles, and Crawdads

Ryan Gosling as Six in The Gray Man (Paul Abell/Netflix © 2022)

Hollywood is enjoying its first real post-pandemic summer blockbuster season, which means most weekends have been featuring only one or two new major new releases. But this weekend’s slate of new releases offers the most choice we’ve seen in months.

The most expensive release of the weekend has a local connection. The Gray Man is based on a book by Memphian Mark Greaney. It stars Ryan Gosling as Sierra Six, an above-top-secret CIA operative who has to go on the lam after uncovering some major government misdeeds. Retired Captain America Chris Evans plays against type as the psychopath hit man sent to track him down. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have worked with Evans before on some small independent movies you probably haven’t heard of called Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Next up is another adaptation of a work by a Southern writer. Delia Owens is a zoologist from Georgia whose debut novel Where The Crawdads Sing became a huge bestseller in 2020. Reese Witherspoon is the executive producer of the film version, directed by Olivia Newman. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kya, nicknamed The Marsh Girl by the inhabitants of the small North Carolina town near where she lives. She’s accused of murdering the town’s star quarterback Chase (Harris Dickinson), and as an outcast, she makes a convenient scapegoat for the mysterious death. Swampy, Southern gothic intrigue ensues.

Lesley Manville earned an Academy Award nomination for Phantom Thread. Paul Gallico’s novel Mrs. ‘Arris Goes To Paris has been adapted for the screen three times. Director Anthony Fabian makes it four. Manville stars as an English maid who becomes obsessed with her boss’ Dior wardrobe, and embarks on an adventure to the City of Lights. French things ensue.

She Will is an intriguing folk horror from director Charlotte Colbert and IFC Films. Alice Krige stars as a film star recovering from cancer in a rural estate best known for a history of witch burning. Turns out the witch ghosts are pissed. Wouldn’t you be?

Gabby Giffords was a Congressional Representative from Arizona married to NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. Then, in 2011, one of her campaign events was attacked by a man with an assault rifle. Six people were killed. Giffords was shot in the head, but survived. Now, Kelly is a Senator and Giffords works for sensible gun control. Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down is a timely documentary from CNN Films.

French director Claire Denis has been quietly making great films since 1999’s Beau Travail. Her latest is Both Sides of the Blade. The great Juliette Binoche stars as Sarah, a Parisian radio DJ who is caught between her comfortable life with husband Jean (Vincent Lindon) and her sexy ex Francois (Gregorie Colin). Who doesn’t love a good erotic thriller?

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A Wrinkle In Time

In situations such as we find ourselves in now, I like to remind readers of Alfred Hitchcock’s attitude towards literary adaptations. When asked by Francois Truffaut if he would ever make a movie of a great novel such as Crime and Punishment, he said no. “In Dostoevsky’s novel there are many, many words, and all of them have a function.”

A great book does more than just tell a story. The writer’s use of language itself is a part of the magic. Having the voice of the author whispering in your head is an entirely different experience than sitting in a theater watching a moving image with an audience. What works very well in one medium will not be as effective when translated into another medium. The best books for adaptations are tightly edited page turners with strong stories. Hitchcock’s observation is boiled down to the dictum “Mediocre books make the best movies.”

Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit walks the meadows of the utopian planet Uriel in A Wrinkle In Time.

A Wrinkle In Time is not a mediocre book. Therein lies the problem with the Disney-produced, Ava DuVernay-directed screen adaptation.

A Wrinkle In Time was a Harry Potter-sized literary sensation when it was first published in 1962. Author Madeline L’Engle drew on her own experiences as an awkward late bloomer to create Meg Murry, the thirteen year old protagonist. Meg begins the novel in the midst of a hurricane of sadness and self doubt that seems to have become an actual hurricane outside the cozy old house where she lives with her brother Charles Wallace and her scientist mother. Her father has been missing for four years, which is the source of much of her angst. The neighbors and the kids at school gossip that he was a deadbeat who ran out on his young family, but, given that he was a rouge NASA scientist who was studying higher dimensional physics, the Murry family hopes that he went somewhere more otherworldly, and might one day return.

Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which and Storm Reid as Meg Murry

DuVernay’s casting instincts are good. Storm Reid plays Meg with a confidence that belies her age. The otherworldly trio of Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) , proto-Time Lord, alien/angel hybrids who travel the cosmos by folding space with their minds, are all spot in. But much of their work in this visually dense film was done in solitude against green screens, and it shows. The same goes for former Peter Pan, Levi Miller, who plays Meg’s companion Calvin, and Deric McCabe who plays Charles Wallace. Faring much better is Zach Galifanakis as The Happy Medium, the oracle the children consult on their search for their missing father, who is played by the ever versatile Chris Pine. The Medium’s world of precariously balanced crystals is one of several compelling visual moments DuVernay and her crew conjure, but the film is so disjointed that it cannot sustain any momentum for long.

Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who

L’Engle’s prose is masterfully compact and often lyrical. She never talks down to her young audience, but uses the limitations of the children’s book to her advantage. But the novel is very much of its time. She was a devout Christian with the education to understand cutting edge science; one way to look at A Wrinkle In Time is as her attempt to reconcile the revelations of cosmology and quantum mechanics with old fashioned American transcendentalism. Her philosophy and imagery were absorbed by the kids of the early sixties, resurfaced when those kids got psychedelicized after the Summer of Love, and later incorporated into New Age mysticism. Her descriptions of the rolling, otherworldly fields of the planet Uriel are rewards themselves. But when they’re rendered as Disney-fied CGI, and characters just stand there and look at them, they’re not so interesting.

Mega Oprah

The root of her vision of evil is the false happiness of enforced conformity, and that’s not a can of worms the capitalist Disney corporation wants to open. L’Engle’s strength is the internal struggles of her young characters, but that’s not something that translates well to the screen, which is all about external appearances. Instead, L’Engle’s admonitions to embrace your weirdness are reduced to forced whimsey.  While I have no doubt the message is needed by America’s young women of color, there’s only so much empowering affirmation you can take in one sitting, even when it’s coming from a 30-foot Mega Oprah. A Wrinkle In Time was long thought to be unfilmable, and this version suggests that conventional wisdom was right.

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They Wuz Robbed! The 2015 Oscar Nominees Revealed

It’s time for the annual ritual of complaining about the Oscar nominations, and I’m here to help. Or at least, throw fuel on the fire.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

2014 was a great year for movies. The two frontrunners, Birdman and Boyhood, both of which have nine nominations, are great movies, but to my mind, the Best Picture category is wide open. The Grand Budapest Hotel and Selma are both equal to the two frontrunners, and since Clint Eastwood has been an increasingly inexplicable perineal Oscar favorite in the twenty-first century, American Sniper could be a surprise winner. If you held a gun to my head, I would probably go with The Grand Budapest Hotel as best picture from the choices given, but I would be happy with any of the top four.

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Boyhood

To me, the Best Director category is clear: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an unprecedented directorial achievement. Movies can be derailed by tiny choices early in the production, and since Linklater’s Boyhood shoot stretched over 12 years, he had plenty of opportunity to mess up, but turned instead a perfect movie. The biggest omission from the Best Director category is Ava DuVernay for Selma, which is just inexcusable, especially when Bennett Miller is nominated for the mediocre morass that is Foxcatcher.

Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything

The Best Actor category also has two inexcusable snubs: First is John Lithgow’s career high performance in Ira Sach’s Love Is Strange. I think Love Is Strange should have been in the running for all of the top-line awards, but Lithgow, Alfred Molina, and Marissa Tormei’s performances in the film were simply unequalled this year. The second, and perhaps more glaring, snub is David Oyelowo, who is exceptional in a really difficult role as Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Steve Carrel’s name recognition got him a nomination, but his performance in Foxcatcher is a one-note disappointment. Among the nominees, I’ll take Eddie Remayne’s perfectly calibrated, physically demanding turn as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything.

Reese Witherspoon in Wild

Without Tormei in the Leading Actress category, it’s going to come down to between Reese Witherspoon in Wild and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. Both are fine performances, but I’ll have to go with the empathetic naturalism of Witherspoon.

Michael Keaton and Ed Norton in Birdman

My knee-jerk pick in the Actor in a Supporting Role is Ethan Hawke in Boyhood, but all of the nominees seem strong. Mark Ruffalo was the best thing about Foxcatcher, and if you watched the trailers for Whiplash, J.K. Simmons seemed like the lead actor, so he’s got a good shot. And don’t count out Ed Norton if a Birdman wave builds.

Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

Suporting Actress, however, should be a runaway for Patricia Arquette, who lays it all out there in Boyhood. Emma Stone greatly exceeded my expectations for her in Birdman, but this is Arquette’s trophy.

Inherent Vice

The screenplay categories are also pretty clear for me. Original Screenplay should go to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is as tight and original piece of screenwriting as Wes Anderson has ever done. My Adapted Screenplay pick is Inherent Vice for pulling off the seemingly impossible task of adapting Thomas Pynchon’s prose. But it probably won’t win, because it has divided audiences so much, so this category is wide open. I wouldn’t be surprised if American Sniper got it, because the book it was based on has been extremely popular. I was surprised that Gone Girl didn’t get nominated, but the category is admittedly pretty stacked.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

I was stunned to see The Lego Movie snubbed in the Animated Feature category, but directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should console themselves by rolling around in their giant piles of money. In the Editing category, Boyhood is the clear winner for the effortlessly clear and inventive way it strung together 12 years of one boy’s life. The visual effects category, however, is wide open. My pick is the photorealistic Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, but Guardians of the Galaxy and Interstellar are both very strong contenders, and Magneto lifting RFK Stadium with his mind in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is among the year’s indelible images.

In sum, the Oscars have given us lots of stuff to argue about this year—which is pretty much their function, right? 

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Wild

I’m not much of an outdoorsman, but I do like to hike. My primary reaction to seeing Reese Witherspoon’s Oscar bait movie Wild was an urge to tramp senselessly through a wilderness setting for a few days. My secondary reaction is that Witherspoon’s probably got a shot at taking home some hardware come Academy Awards time.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who this time last year was getting Oscar buzz for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto with Dallas Buyer’s Club, Wild is baed on a memoir by Cheryl Strayed that was a runaway bestseller in 2012. After the death of her mother, Strayed spiraled into depression and addiction. Hitting rock bottom, she rejected conventional therapy in favor of embarking on a seemingly Quixotic quest: Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada by herself.
Wild’s secret weapon is the screenplay by Nick Hornby, the novelist whose first novel High Fidelity was released in 1995, the same year Strayed set out on her epic hike. Hornby deftly adapts Strayed’s life story, using flashbacks to add just enough complexity to keep the story interesting without sacrificing clarity. In the flashbacks, we meet Strayed’ mother, Bobbi Grey (Laura Dern) whose upbeat attitude in the face of adversity and ultimately death both enlivened Strayed and seemed to set an impossible standard for her to live up to.
Dern is terrific in this all-important supporting role, but it’s Witherspoon’s party, and she delivers the goods. She traces Strayed’s parallel journeys, the physical one of slow, uneven progress north and the spiritual one of breaking down and building back up. Finding oneself by going back to nature is a core American narrative that goes back before Thoreau went to Walden Pond, and it retains it potency even today. Strayed didn’t exactly blaze new trails through the forest like Deerslayer, but when she’s a lone woman wandering through the desert wondering whether she’s going to be done in by her own city-girl inexperience or the ever-present danger of sexual violence from men who might help her, the stakes feel real. One of the unexpected highlights of Witherspoon’s performance comes in a comic early scene where Strayed, hitchhiking to avoid a snowed-in mountain pass, is interviewed by a reporter for a publication called the Hobo Times. Witherspoon all but stamps her feet insisting that she is not a hobo, even though everything the reporter is saying fits her situation perfectly, until she snatches his offer of a hobo care package out of his hands.
It does help that the admittedly predictable story transpires in unabashedly beautiful natural settings, from snowy mountains to the high desert. Cinematographer Yves Bélanger’s fine, occasionally digitally enhanced, landscape photography could inspire some serious wanderlust, but that could just be a sign that your intrepid reviewer needs to get out of the house more. Regardless, Wild is a cinematic journey worth taking.