The “beautiful” movie Reese Witherspoon called her biggest influence
Whether you know her as the plucky, pink-clad legal genius in Legally Blonde, June Cash in Walk the Line (for which she won an Oscar), or Matthew Broderick’s absolutely relentless teenage nemesis in Election, Reese Witherspoon has been subverting the sunny blonde stereotype on screen for decades. In recent years, however, she’s transferred her influence to the world behind the camera, becoming one of the industry’s most powerful and successful actors-turned-producers.
She started producing projects all the way back in the early 2000s before she earned her ‘Best Actress’ award and aged out of peak objectification, but it wasn’t until the runaway successes of Wild, Gone Girl, and Big Little Lies that it became clear she was serious about this new role in the industry and had the business savvy to back it up. These days, she produces a mind-boggling number of movies and TV series, centred around female characters and helmed by women.
In this way, she is an outsider, because female-led, female-centred movies are still few and far between, especially where large budgets are concerned, and her projects, whether they be the hit HBO domestic drama Big Little Lies, the stylish neo noir of Gone Girl, or the Southern murder mystery Where the Crawdads Sing, tend to sit squarely in the realm of melodrama, and while the focus on female writers and directors is unusual, she takes her cues for the genre from the classics.
During her 2015 Oscars campaign for Wild, Witherspoon was asked to name her favourite movie, and she chose one that goes way back to a time when Hollywood was serious about female characters but not interested in having women behind the camera, with her saying, “I saw Splendor in the Grass on TV, and I just thought it was so beautiful… I thought Natalie Wood was amazing, and Warren Beatty, his first movie; it was just beautiful.”
Released in 1961 and directed by On the Waterfront Oscar winner Elia Kazan, Splendor in the Grass is high melodrama, a gorgeous, overwrought portrayal of Kansas teens in the 1920s driven to madness and mediocrity by sexual frustration.
Wood and Beatty star as the central lovers who are tormented by their community and made so desperate that she is committed to a mental institution, and he takes up ranching.
The film contains rape, suicide, deadly car crashes, a whispered Wordsworth poem, folksy accents, and countless tears. It’s to Kazan’s credit as a director and the stars’ credit as performers that it actually qualifies as a tearjerker rather than a comedy.
Critics weren’t sure what to think of it. Many praised its unusually candid portrayal of sex and repression, while others were scandalised.
It was quickly outdone in that department. By the end of the decade, movies like The Graduate, Blow Up, and Easy Rider had put the prudes in their place and reoriented audiences’ expectations. By those standards, all of the hand-wringing over Splendor in the Grass looks pretty quaint, but as Witherspoon can attest, the drama still hits. It might not have the same shock value that it did in 1961, but Kazan’s legendary ability to draw out career-best performances from his actors still stands the test of time.
