Reese Witherspoon: behind-the-scenes revival of Hollywood’s unlikely feminist

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/09/reese-witherspoon-hollywood-producer-film-profile

Version 0 of 1.

You can spend your way out of a recession, but can you produce your way out of a career slump? That is the question confronting Reese Witherspoon, the actor best known for the Legally Blonde comedies and an Oscar-winning turn as June Carter Cash in the 2005 film Walk the Line.

Witherspoon has emerged as an influential and high-achieving producer. Her name has backed up two major recent releases. The first, her own starring vehicle Wild, adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s best selling memoir, is currently in US cinemas and being talked of as a serious Oscar contender. The second was the David Fincher thriller Gone Girl, one of last year’s most anticipated films, which Witherspoon bought up when the source material, Gillian Flynn’s novel, had still to be published.

Wild, on its own, appears to be restoring Witherspoon’s status as a leading Hollywood actor; after her Oscar win, her previously assured ability to pick successful projects looked as if it had deserted her. Some lukewarm romances and underperforming comedies – Four Christmases, How Do You Know, Water for Elephants, This Means War – as well as the well-intentioned but flawed political thriller Rendition meant that the second half of the 2000s and early 2010s was a largely fallow period. This included a spell, between 2008 and 2010, when, aside from the animated comedy Monsters vs Aliens, she didn’t do any screen work at all.

Her professional uncertainty was compounded in 2013 by a bizarre drink driving incident, in which Witherspoon was arrested and subsequently charged with disorderly conduct after the car her husband, Jim Toth, was driving was stopped by police.

Witherspoon, 38, is certainly drawing considerable acclaim for her acting in Wild: an intricately constructed, flashback-heavy mosaic describing a woman’s cathartic trek across more than a thousand of miles of desert, and a showcase for minimalist, downbeat performance. It’s certainly doing well for Witherspoon on the awards circuit: she has just been nominated for a best actress Bafta, and will find out on Sunday whether she has won a best actress Golden Globe.

Wild, however, is a long way from the brisk, energetic roles that made her name – in the likes of the Alexander Payne-directed high-school satire Election in 1999, or the hit comedy Legally Blonde two years later. Both films drew on Witherspoon’s apparently chipper real-life personality, something that she enshrined in the name of her own company, Type A Films, during her first steps towards becoming a producer, when she lobbied studios to get a Legally Blonde sequel off the ground. (Type A personalities are defined as competitive, critical and impatient with delays – qualities that would appear ideal in Hollywood producers.)

According to Leslie Felperin, film critic for the Hollywood Reporter, it’s a personality profile that resonates well in the US, but perhaps less so outside it. “The sort of person she seems to represent – the class valedictorian, the head cheerleader – doesn’t translate culturally particularly well. Brits in particular I suspect find it irritating. In her case though, the teeth may be perfect, the hair blowdried – but there’s a mess underneath all that.”

Felperin points out the difference with Sandra Bullock, another actor with an unlikely comedic gift; Bullock, she says, “is just a little more likable. With Witherspoon, there’s a steeliness under the bubbliness. She’s very watchable, but there is something very icy about her – not Hitchcock iciness, but one you suspect might tear your throat out”.

Witherspoon began working in films aged 14, making an instant impression after being cast in the lead role for the 1991 teen romance The Man in the Moon. Through the next decade, she rarely put a foot wrong, appearing in everything from in-your-face indie dramas (SFW) to big studio thrillers (Fear) to wholesome family fare (A Far Off Place) – alongside superior teen movies such as Cruel Intentions and Pleasantville. Being cast as annoying teen Tracy Flick in Election proved, in retrospect, to be a masterstroke: not only did it subvert and undermine her teen-idol image, but also, in Payne, allied her with a director with serious intellectual credentials. Election, more than any other single film, gave her the credibility to take the big upward step. Legally Blonde cemented her persona as an unexpectedly tough operator, and paved the way for a major commercial hit, Sweet Home Alabama, which took $127m (£84m) in the US.

Witherspoon was one of the actors who benefited from the profusion of chick flicks in the 2000s, along with the likes of Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Aniston. Aniston, arguably, is the figure she has most in common with: both as a performer, and as someone who attempted to take control of their own image. Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Variety magazine, suggests that, “like Aniston, part of her appeal is her girl-next-door quality, and both … have transitioned from ingenues to mature actresses known for bold artistic choices and broad popular appeal”. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Aniston is in the Oscar mix this year too, with a rare dramatic foray as a suicidal woman in Cake.

Gaydos, though, has less time for the notion that Witherspooon – or Aniston for that matter – is in any kind of real difficulty career-wise. “I always say: every star is one hit role from being right back on top. If you look at the list of films that Witherspoon has in development, I suspect there’s a project that will again put to rest questions about her commercial viability. Wild proves that she is clearly working at the peak of her creative powers.”

Felperin, on the other hand, is considerably more sceptical as far as the likes of Wild and Cake are concerned. “It’s a bit ‘please give me an Oscar’, isn’t it? We all hate it when actors seem to think they can get a nomination by being grumpy or a bit badly behaved. Witherspoon’s character in Wild takes heroin and and sleeps with a few guys… but come on, it’s not exactly Wolf of Wall Street. I like her more as a behind-the-scenes figure; her determination and smarts come out in her producing projects. She comes across as a smart cookie and has gone on record saying she wants to hire women directors, with strong female characters.”

Witherspoon has certainly emerged, somewhat unexpectedly, as one of the flagwavers of Hollywood feminism. She put her “career break” down to the paucity of roles for women as they move out of their 20s, telling Entertainment Weekly in 2010 that “I just didn’t read anything I liked … There are a lot of really, really, really big movies about robots and things – and there’s not a part for a 34-year-old woman in a robot movie.” It’s a common enough complaint, but Witherspoon was motivated enough to do something about it.

In a recent article in Variety, she recalled a string of dispiriting meetings with studio executives in 2012. “I think it was literally [only] one studio that had a project for a female lead over 30. And I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get busy.’” The result was the reconfiguration of Type A Films into an outfit called Pacific Standard, with which Witherspoon is using her clout as an A-List actor to get a string of interesting, if hardly revolutionary, films off the ground.

Gone Girl was their first acquisition to make it into production; Witherspoon, no doubt, planned to take the lead role, but after director David Fincher joined the project, she stepped aside when it became clear Fincher wanted to cast Rosamund Pike. “It didn’t matter if I was in it or not,” Witherspoon explained to Variety. “When you get someone like David Fincher to agree to do your movie … you basically go, ‘OK, whatever you want!’ And get out of his way.”

Wild would appear to be a more hands-on, personal affair, with Witherspoon able to develop the property, produce the film and take the lead role. Like Gone Girl, the source material is by a woman, but the director, Dallas Buyers Club’s Jean-Marc Vallée, is not – an ambition realised in Pacific Standard’s third production project, Don’t Mess With Texas, which is directed by Anne Fletcher (best known for romcom The Proposal).

A “buddy action comedy” about a cop (played by Witherspoon) and a prisoner on the run from corrupt police, Don’t Mess With Texas may not radically realign gender politics all by itself, but it may well be that elusive project to restore Witherspoon’s aforementioned “commercial viability”.

Meanwhile, Witherspoon can afford to exercise her own interests and preoccupations: she has filmed a small role in Inherent Vice for Paul Thomas Anderson, yet another connection to one of America’s modern master film-makers, and headlined an unlikely immigration drama, The Good Lie, about Sudanese refugees in the US, that was released to little fanfare last October. In truth, no one expects her to repeat her Walk the Line triumph at the Oscars next month, with Julianne Moore currently the firm favourite for Still Alice.

But Witherspoon’s success with Wild remains evidence of one of Hollywood’s most remarkable reinventions of recent years, and one that appears accomplished through sheer force of personality as much as anything else. As Felperin says. “She could be the next [former CEO of Paramount] Sherry Lansing – she has the right kind of brain. There’s a power about her that gets things done.”

Potted profile

Born March 22, 1976

Career Debuted in The Man in The Moon in 1991, but had her Hollywood breakthrough in Legally Blonde in 2001. Has starred in successful films Sweet Home Alabama, Walk the Line, Mud and Wild. She also produced 2014’s Gone Girl.

High point Her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk The Line won her the best actress Oscar.

Low point She divorced her husband Ryan Philippe in 2007 and blamed their separation for four years of “floundering” in her career

What she says “I have this reductive experience where I’m put into this tiny little box...the likeable box”

What they say “She has a sweet-natured intelligence and the kind of humility that upstages all the male alpha-egos”