by Brandon Petersen
...
I am as feminist as my privileged white male roots allow me to be.
My mom was the primary bread-winner in my household. She has always been my hero, mostly because it hasn't been easy for her. Without a college degree, she started as a secretary and moved her way up to a corporate vice president. Trust me, that long and winding path was littered with male superiors who thought they knew better and took it out on her every time she proved them wrong and messed with their nut-swinging egos.
But even though I have always admired women for their incredible strength -- the type of strength most men rarely display at any point in their own lives -- I hate to admit, when it came to this year's group of Oscar-potentials, I saw all of the male-leading movies first. In fact, the only reason I wound up seeing Reese Witherspoon in Wild was because I had already seen every other non-animated flick at my favorite theater and I really needed to just get away from my editing station for a few hours.
I'm not going to compare Wild to all of the Best Picture nominees, there simply isn't enough lent space here from my good friend Ethan to expound on why it's better than all of them. But I am going to put Wild side-by-side with two male-dominated Oscar-hopefuls, The Imitation Game and American Sniper, and show why the dead-weight of Witherspoon's backpack is far more powerful than Brad Cooper's expertly-aimed rifle, and endlessly more influential than Benedict Cumberbatch's code-breaking computer.
As we all know, films aren't really what they are about. American Sniper isn't about a legendary soldier from Texas whose sole purpose in life is to protect the sheep, it's about addiction. The Imitation Game isn't about the process of breaking the Nazi's enigma code, it's about equality. And just like those two films, Wild isn't about a young woman taking a long walk, it's about self-forgiveness.
All three of these films had the opportunity to connect with me on a very personal level, as I am a recovering alcoholic, who has been discriminated against because of my outward appearance for much of my life, and has made so many past mistakes, I could fill an entire novel with nothing but regrets.
And while I left both American Sniper and The Imitation Game thinking about the films, their merits, their deficiencies, and breaking them down as a student of film, I left Wild with tears streaking my cheeks, thinking about how every single bump in my road has led me to a point where I have finally found happiness, stability and a sense of purpose.
In other words, what a film should strive to do is not simply tell a story, or make a good point, but transport every person in the theater inside of that film's world for a couple of hours and make them realize the underlying forces pushing that film forward aren't just happening to Reese Witherspoon, but to themselves as well.
The question remains then, how does Wild technically succeed where the other two fail?
To answer that, you need only look to the backpack.
In Wild's opening sequence, we meet Witherspoon for the first time in a cheap motel on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. She's preparing for her hike, which we don't know the details of yet, by assembling a massive pack filled with all the camping accouterments one could ever hope to need. This isn't a backpack, it's a mountain of plastic and vinyl the size of which would make Dwayne Johnson blush.
Pack finally ready and morning anew, it's time for Cheryl Strayed to head out on her journey. There's only one issue: The freaking backpack is literally bigger than herself, and in order to strap it on, she must bust out every single yoga pose in the book, and wedge herself skyward from there by any means necessary. It is an awkward, hilarious scene, but also the film's finest, because in such a understated manner it creates all the stakes we as viewers will ever need for the next two hours.
The simple visualization of the mammoth backpack consuming Witherspoon's tiny, straining frame, is the movie. By the end, when we stand on the misty Bridge of Gods alongside Witherspoon, the pack seems light as air. It's no longer a hinderance, but instead, Witherspoon's best friend. It's her home, it's company, it's her food, it's everything.
For a film like Wild, that teaches us that our past isn't something to hold on to negatively, but rather, to learn from, and grow from, and come to love as a part of ourselves, the imagery of the backpack is a subtle yet brilliant way of connecting the film's viewers with it's character, and that, in turn, is what transports us through and onto the screen ourselves.
We feel the encumbered pain of the pack as we chuckle awkwardly while Witherspoon withers underneath it at the outset, and we feel free, calm, happy, and learned of ourselves, by the time we stand confidently alongside Witherspoon on that bridge, reminded, of course, by the pack Strayed clings to with both hands, that we too are changed.
And while Brad Cooper and Benedict Cumberbatch deserve great adulation for their respective roles in American Sniper and The Imitation Game, both of their performances were on par with Witherspoon's, the failing of those films comes in the choices made by their directors.
What Jean-Marc Vallée includes within his main character's journey are inner and outer dialogues which are completely absent in both Sniper and Game. There are countless scenes in all three films where their directors chose to show their characters isolated and struggling, but what sets Wild apart from the other two, is a sense that we always know what Witherspoon is feeling.
Be it through her journal entries, her inner monologue, or with the men she interacts with along her hike, we are always let inside her head and her heart, and we know exactly what she's dealing with at any particular moment.
And while all three films use flashbacks to set up their present characters, Wild's flashbacks are gritty and raw, and get to the heart of exactly why Witherspoon is currently in pain. Sniper and Game, on the other hand, deploy banal flashbacks, rehashing childhood motivations through interactions with authority figures. They fail to connect emotionally with anyone in the theater who didn't grow up hunting in Texas, or having boyhood crushes on classmates in boarding school. But fucking the wrong person because you felt bad about yourself? Taking drugs you know you shouldn't to deal with pain? Losing a mom who was your heart and soul? Wild's flashback are ones that most everyone can relate to, if not directly, then indirectly, because there's not a human on the planet whose never experienced regret.
In American Sniper, we are given a multitude of scenes in which Cooper sits alone crying without any dialogue or inner monologue. We have no idea if he is mourning his lost sheep, or if the guilt of killing children is currently overwhelming him. We have a pretty good idea it's not because he doesn't get to see his own kids much, and it's only eventually we realize that what Cooper's character is actually upset about his retirement; the thought of no longer being able to serve his life's purpose. And even then, that's only a projection based in part on another Iraq War film far more skillfully made -- by a woman -- The Hurt Locker, which first depicted war as an addiction, and left absolutely no ambiguity about the motivations of its main character.
The Imitation Game is slightly better in dealing with Cumberbatch's break-down moments, which, again, the actor pulls off skillfully, but it suffers from the same lack of depth that Sniper does. Alan Turing is singularly obsessed with solving the enigma problem, and that insessant focus takes up the entirety of the film. The only respite we get as an audience is when we are taken through flashback to Cumberbatch's youth where we learn how he fell in love with a boy and had his heart broken for the first time. That storyline only begins to break the surface of the complexities a gay man in Nazi Europe must have faced, much less a genius with the literal weight of the world on his shoulders. One scene in tears opposite Keira Knightly, and a showdown with some security toughs who unplug his massively under-explained super-machine, is not enough to get across just how epically Turing struggled throughout his enormously important life.
All we are left with at the end of The Imitation Game is a lazy postscript which fails miserably at encapsulating Turing's grand experiment. In fact, the saddest part of both Sniper and Game is that that both films spend two-plus hours building up two incredibly likable characters only to depict their horribly tragic deaths in a single line of text. This, of course, leads to more questions for the viewer that the films simply refuse to answer.
When we stand on the Bridge of the Gods with Cheryl Strayed, we know exactly where she's been, we know exactly where she's headed, and we too have been moved by her journey.
I saw a lot of films this year, a lot of great films. I thought Sniper on the whole was incredibly entertaining, and Cooper was fantastic. I loved Bill Murray in St. Vincent, and Michael Keaton in Birdman. David Oyelowo was transcendent as Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and the Academy should be ashamed of itself for not including him among the nominees.
But out of all these fine, male-leading performances, none of them held a candle to the power of Reese Witherspoon, her slight frame, and that gargantuan backpack.
I've seen it over and over again throughout my mom's life. Women are always underestimated and under appreciated in male-dominated cultures, and Hollywood is no different.
In the view of many Academy members, Wild wasn't good enough to be nominated for Best Picture.
In my view, the contest wasn't even close.
