Film Carew: Wild, Still Alice

24 January 2015 | 1:53 pm | Anthony Carew

Reese Witherspoon dares to get dirty in a based-on-a-true-story exodus tale - and it pays off with abundance.

WILD

If you’ve seen the trailer for Wild, or read any of its pre-release press, you probably feel like you have a handle on the film: it’s a piece of inspirational Oscar-bait in which the guy who made Dallas Buyers Club presides over the Reese Witherspoon comeback, the fallen starlet paying a cinematic penance by playing a woman who hikes 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail following the death of her mother.

Yet, whatever you think you know about Wild, whatever this kind of awards-show-season movie normally is, best leave such preconceptions at the cinema door. Like the giant backpack Witherspoon lugs with her through California and Oregon, it’s so much baggage.

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Wild isn’t an inspirational tribute to resilience, but a far-more-fascinating attempt to use cinema, the artform that so mirrors the human experience, to portray the way that memory works. It’s no wandering-into-the-wilderness idyll, but a film about being a prisoner to temporality; about how, even when —or especially when— a person is communing with the natural landscape, they’re lost in thought. It doesn’t use its tragic back-story as an emotional cudgel, clubbing the audience with cheap notes of sentimentality, but instead stages an open conversation on grieving, the way lost loved ones live on in the mind.

Much of this traces back to its source text, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail, an evocatively written work —penned with years-later perspective— that matches her trek to a journey into her personal history. In adapting it, Nick Hornby(!) pushes the idea further, turning the tale into a tapestry of memory, in which ideas connect across time and place. And Jean-Marc Vallée, fresh off Dallas Buyers Club’s huge success, proves perfectly suited to the material; his work as editor, alongside recurring collaborator Martin Pensa, as remarkable as any other element in the film.

Vallée, 51, grew up in Montréal, the son of a radio disc-jockey, and harboured an obsession with music from his childhood, eventually becoming a club DJ. This history been there, throughout his films: in C.R.A.Z.Y., a coming-of-age, dysfunctional-family saga that spans decades and the breadth of a classic-rock record collection; and, especially, in Café de Flore, where Vallée juxtaposes two unrelated narratives —one a contemporary story about a star DJ— and cuts between them, back-and-forth, spinning them together like two records.

In Wild, all of the musical signifiers are as important as anything else. When Witherspoon hears a Shangri-las song on in a car, finds Leonard Cohen echoing in her mind, hums a few bars of Bruce Springsteen to keep her walking, or desperately hopes 4 Non Blondes won’t get stuck in her head, it connects to her memories; these few loops of melody, a scattered mixtape encoded only in the brain’s wiring, being indivisible from the reveries they inspire.

“I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,” Witherspoon huffs, in the film’s opening moments, evoking Simon & Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa even as she’s on a mountaintop, preparing to rip off a loose toenail. This unexpected opening instantly suggests Wild’s obsession with music, and its disinterest in linear narrative.

As Vallée scatters images of its protagonist’s life —a childhood of terrors and comfort, an adolescence of literary obsession, a 20s filled with heroin use and self-destructive sex— throughout her journey north, Witherspoon is both walking away from the scarred past and into it.  She may be alone in the wilderness, but around her all she sees are ghosts.

And no spectre is more persistent than her late mother, played, beautifully, by Laura Dern. Though Dern appears on screen in largely fragmented moments, there’s real depth and complexity to her performance, to every loaded interaction between mother and daughter. A largely low-key rest-of-the-cast —including Gaby Hoffmann, Michiel Huisman, and Thomas Sadoski— is also given plenty to work with; Vallée, filming fast-and-loose with handheld cameras in natural light, proving himself a fine director of actors.

After years toiling in the rom-com trenches and a stint in the movie-biz wilderness, Witherspoon relishes the role she’s been given, and the fact that the film even exists is a testament to its star, who bought the book rights and took command of the production. That she dares get gritty —to not wear make-up, to exert true physicality, to sweat, to grimace, and to simulate rough sex and seedy drug use— seems like a minor element of a greater, great performance; the persnickety trivialities to titillate the gossip-mill.

What’s more remarkable is how little Witherspoon’s history —her own baggage— weighs on Wild. Pirouetting through its free-associative story with impressionist whimsy, Vallée’s film feels light, restless, ever-shifting; as fleeting, fluid, and mercurial as memory.

STILL ALICE

At the opening of Still Alice, Julianne Moore, its titular character, is at the top of her game: still a belle at 50, a linguistics professor, married to Alec Baldwin, with three kids to her name (a lawyer, a doctor, and Kristen Stewart!). And yet, even though she clearly Has It All, it’s not hard to notice that sad piano music, tinkling away, each note so hesitant and fragile. It’s as if her All is about to all fall apart! And, soon enough, sure enough, she’s taking an appointment with a neurologist, an earnest man in a white coat who informs her she has early-onset Alzheimer's.

Plotted with complete linearity, Still Alice is a softly lensed, disease-of-the-week TV melodrama trussed in Oscar threads. Moore is genuinely great, and her role gives her a lot to work with: her character, in the deterioration of her mind, changing from scene to scene, emotion to emotion, every step trodden as if on uneasy footing. Baldwin does sterling work as a supportive husband navigating this complete shift in life, relationship, and financial status. And directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland make some interesting framing choices, particular in scenes in which —both out to communicate her character’s interiority and obviously mesmerised by her performance— they hold the camera on Moore, not looking away even when others talk.

But, dramatically, the film feels flat, pat, neat. Based on a novel by Lisa Genova, Still Alice is stagey when it should be raw; cute when it should be savage; reductionist when it should get philosophical. Its grandstanding scene involves Moore giving a paper in front of a conference on Alzheimer's research, her professional and personal lives merging into one. There’s nothing wrong with the words Moore’s saying —it’s a talk on “learning ‘the art of losing’ every day”— but, as she goes, strings slowly swell behind her, a standing ovation beckoning. It’s pure inspirational-movie cliché, and, more than Moore’s magnetic performance, it defines what kind of film we’re truly watching.