The Last Word: How do we wish to be remembered?

The Last Word (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for blunt profanity
By Derrick Bang

Once the characters are introduced, and the core premise established, most folks will be able to anticipate all the plot beats coming in Stuart Ross Fink’s script.

Doesn’t matter. The execution is charming, from start to finish.

Small-town newspaper reporter Anne Sherman (Amanda Seyfried, left) is astonished when
take-charge Harriet Lauler (Shirley MacLaine) barges into the publisher's office and
insists on commissioning — and fine-tuning — the obituary that'll run after her death.

Actors lucky enough to achieve milestone birthdays often are rewarded with the opportunity to play eccentric and/or cantankerous oldsters who leave a trail of shell-shocked victims in their wake: a stereotype that rarely fails to entertain. Indeed, such character portraits often result in nominations and awards. (Just for starters: Maggie Smith, The Lady in the Van; Rolf Lassgård, A Man Called Ove; Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, Grumpy Old Men; Art Carney, Harry and Tonto.)

Which brings us to tart-tongued, obsessive/compulsive Harriet Lauler: a once successful advertising executive whose world has contracted to the confines of her spacious, beautifully appointed — but empty — house, and who now marks the passage of each grindingly slow day with boredom and frustration. And who is played, with waspish delight, by Shirley MacLaine.

The Last Word — terrific title, by the way — finds Harriet adrift in a lonesome existence of her own making: completely isolated from the family members, former friends and colleagues that she has annoyed, offended, insulted or merely exasperated. Whether this seclusion is deserved, is beside the point; our heartbreaking introduction to Harriet finds her at low ebb, MacLaine wordlessly conveying the woman’s hushed despair during a somber montage accompanied solely by soft notes from Nathan Matthew David’s score.

This is by no means the first film to preface its narrative by mining gentle chuckles from a character’s ill-conceived suicide attempt. Goldie Hawn won an Oscar for doing so, back in 1969’s Cactus Flower; poor Lassgård’s similar efforts kept getting frustrated, in the aforementioned A Man Called Ove. The worst part for Harriet, after hospital treatment, is that she’s embarrassed to have revealed a weakness in her unswerving refinement.

But the act also prompts an epiphany, when she happens to glance at a random obituary in the local newspaper. Suddenly concerned about how she’ll be remembered in a few similarly short paragraphs, after her passing, Harriet impulsively decides to control the situation. She therefore hires the young journalist in question — Anne Sherman (Amanda Seyfried) — to write her obituary. Now, while she’s still alive.

Wild: An incredible journey

Wild (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for nudity, sexual content, profanity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.2.15

In June 1995, at the age of 26 and with her life in what could have been an inescapable downward spiral, Cheryl Strayed impulsively — foolishly, naïvely, absurdly — embarked on a solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail.

A glimpse backward, at a happier time: Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon, right) watches as her
mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern) enjoys a daily ride on the beloved horse that is one of the
few precious things in her life.

The Minneapolis-based liberal arts scholar — magna cum laude, with a double major in English and women’s studies — had zero experience with such activities, but she knew one thing: Her life was in crisis, and she had to do something.

Attempting to regain her soul while trekking through Nature’s wonderland likely seemed a reasonable plan.

The resulting memoir — Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail — was published in the spring of 2012, reaching No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list that July. The book was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and in fact had been optioned by Reese Witherspoon’s production company before copies even hit bookstores.

And so here we are, two years and change later, with director Jean-Marc Vallée’s big-screen adaptation bringing Witherspoon the best reviews of her career: accolades that are heartily deserved.

Vallée will be remembered as the director/editor who just last year guided Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto to Academy Awards in Dallas Buyers Club. Clearly, Vallée has a gift for extracting the best from his actors, and he has worked the same magic here: not merely with Witherspoon, but also — and equally notably — with Laura Dern, utterly luminescent as Cheryl’s wise and loving mother, Bobbi.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if both Witherspoon and Dern galloped home with the same two Oscars.

Vallée also is drawn to fact-based stories involving people in deep spiritual crisis: self-destructive individuals who — whether through anger, anguish or an epiphany — abruptly resolve to turn things around, to make a difference. Two decades passed before scrappy AIDS angel Ron Woodroof’s saga became a film, in Dallas Buyers Club; I’m intrigued by the similar length of time that passed before Strayed felt comfortable turning her chronicle into a book (after which, the film couldn’t have been made faster).

One suspects she needed time to process everything.