Was Reese Witherspoon’s career worth it?
Dec 31, 2017 20:59:19 GMT
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Post by Phoenix101 on Dec 31, 2017 20:59:19 GMT
After a critically acclaimed debut at age 14 in 1991’s The Man in the Moon, why would an aspiring actress enroll at Stanford and move to Northern California in the first place? “I was never going to be an actor who lives in their car because their dream was so big. [If acting didn’t work] I would have gone from Stanford to medical school and become a surgeon. Right now, I’d probably be the premier surgeon and pediatric cardiologist at Vanderbilt University,” she says, pausing. “What? I’m just being honest. I’m ambitious, and I’m over hiding that.”
People, the media for the most part, like to say how Reese Witherspoon has had a successful career over the years, but has she really? Has she had something that will live on after she dies? What if she never did acting and just became a doctor?
Going to her early career, she showed promise. Her versatility shouldn’t be understated. She played a violent, juvenile delinquent, a sex-obsessed teenager, a stuck-up politician wannabe, a pure, innocent young woman, and a love-torn young teen. All were the same character in a way yet she played each one differently and you believed each performance, at least in my opinion.
I get the feeling Legally Blonde was the film that turned her career for the worse. You look at her previous films, Elle Woods was completely different than the usual character she played before, when she would play anti-social rebels, but Woods was more optimistic and friendly. The film would’ve been utterly forgotten had it not been for Witherspoon. She made the character much more dimensional than in the script. The film made her famous and gave her a Golden Globe nod.
But look at her career, post-Legally Blonde, the majority of her work has been rated ROTTEN at Rotten Tomatoes. She stuck to mostly romantic comedies that refused to challenge her and only serve up as time wasters. She did one drama, Vanity Fair, but that was a failure. She apparently struck gold with Walk The Line, a conventional biopic clearly made to cash in on Ray’s popularity. It worked. She won the Oscar for it, even if she remains to this day considered to be one of the worst Best Actress winners of all time.
Post-Oscar, she hit rock bottom. She was in the middle of a public and brutal divorce and it showed in her work. Her films were flat out critically panned bombs, with the exception of Four Christmases, which was hated by critics and Vince Vaughn (whom Witherspoon hated while filming) should have some of the credit for its BO success. Not to mention an embarrassing arrest that soured her to the world. It seemed like her career was over.
What happened? She stopped taking lead roles and turned to small supporting work in films like Mud and Inherent Vice. She rarely turned up in the reviews for said films due to her limited screentime but the films themselves were critically acclaimed. Her next film, Wild, was her comeback, giving the best performance of her career, a role she got nominated for an Oscar for. Then she crapped on that goodwill with the much-hated bomb Hot Pursuit, and her career was again in doubt. Her next feature was Home Again, another bomb. Her upcoming feature is Wrinkle in Time, a role originally slated for Lupita Nyong’o before the Disney executives forced Witherspoon to play the role. It’s a supporting one, so it’s success or failure can’t be put on her but it does Segway into another topic.
She’s been very vocal recently about how television/streaming is much better than film, though that seems to come out of a bitterness for cinema as she’s gotten much success on TV in recent years. Enter Big Little Lies, an acclaimed hit for HBO, winning several awards. Witherspoon was thought of highly in the show but she was overshadowed by her much better acting co-stars, including Emmy winner Nicole Kidman. That didn’t bother her much as she still won an Emmy, albeit for producing. Witherspoon has apparently abandoned films as she has another TV project for Apple and she left a very promising project to do Big Little Lies season 2. That should be an indication that she’s more than happy on TV. It wouldn’t surprise me if Wrinkle is her last film.
But perhaps it was for the best. Maybe or maybe not. My point is that even in her best work, I don’t think she’s in anything that will stand the test of time. She’ll most likely be remembered as that “flavor of the week” actress who used to be famous. She has an Oscar but has she ever starred in a film nominated for Best Picture? Nope. Anything in the Library or Congress or AFI? Nope. With all her supposed successes, those will be forgotten in the upcoming future, while her contemporaries will live on through their beloved works. If that’s the case, then Witherspoon should’ve been a doctor. Either way, she will be forgotten.
