Once she’d decided to take on her gritty new role in “Wild,” there were a few things Reese Witherspoon knew she DIDN’T want to hear from movie studio executives.
Without question, the Thomas Pynchon character that most persistently arouses reader fascination is Pynchon himself. Already, we are seeing reports that Pynchon makes a brief cameo appearance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of his 2009 mystery novel (for lack of a more precise term) and attended the New York Film Festival’s press screening. Of course, it is difficult to verify any of that, since nobody knows what he looks like.
The movie poster for “The Good Lie” features a smiling Reese Witherspoon, front and center. But, truth be told, neither Witherspoon nor her character is the film’s star—not in the essential sense. The real stars are the Sudanese children at the bottom of the poster, their backs to us, trudging across an empty, sun-scorched expanse.