Wild
In Wild, Reese Witherspoon gets much darker than some viewers may be used to seeing her. It’s not that she’s never led (or followed, depending on your perspective) a character down a dark path before, but many, including this reviewer, tend to think of her as one of America’s Sweethearts, a label that gets applied to favorite female leads that are simply likeable. The pitfalls of such labels include not being taken seriously, though one would think in Witherspoon’s case she would have shed that with her Oscar win in 2006 for her portrayal of June Carter in Walk the Line. There’s also at least a little bit of a sexist overtone to that label and, in now admitting understanding that, I’ll refrain from its use any further. The devil in Witherspoon’s character, again a portrayal of a real-life woman, though far less famous, is in the complexity and duality. Cheryl (Witherspoon) is a woman wracked with pain, anger, guilt and a dark history of her own creation based on how she r...