Jean-Marc Vallée’s signature style left behind a body of work that celebrated survival.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Sharp Objects, Wild, and Big Little Lies.
I was hanging laundry out recently as the mid-morning sun dappled my skin through garden leaves, and as I looked past the gaps in street houses, I could see mountains miles away. When I’m struck by nature’s beauty, and feel magnetically pulled toward it, my mind mysteriously wanders to Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild — one of the greatest ‘the only way out is through’ movies.
Before his passing in December 2021, Vallée built a career known for delicate, unique, and strikingly edited stories about adrift women. His TV adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, where idealistic Monterey, California living hid secrets; his rendition of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, which followed a self-harming alcoholic confronting generational trauma in her broiling Minnesota hometown; And Wild, based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, about a former drug addict who abruptly decides to literally walk away from her pain.
Vallée’s interests were specific. He loved stories about hardship, spiritual rebirth, and finding new versions of ourselves in the shards of our lives. Also recognized for his creative partnerships with female authors — who created the source material of his most famous works — and collaborative process with bright editing talents, he had a unique visual language.
Time is easily pierced in Vallée’s films. The director understood the nuances of memory, and used that understanding to create moments where the past pierces through space-time. Camille’s (Amy Adams) reality in Sharp Objects is impeded by silent flashes of her childhood, and words she can’t shake are etched into scars on her body throughout; Big Little Lies’ Jane (Shailene Woodley) has a looping recollection of footprints on a beach, from the memory of chasing down the man who brutalized her; Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) is visited by vivid echoes of her late mother, Bobbi, (Laura Dern) as she hikes.
Vallée treated time as if it were a constantly shifting thing, where remembering a person or event for the 100th time could still reveal new insights. Many of his protagonists exist in their present and past simultaneously, and the context of their lives is pieced together block by block.
Cheryl stands atop a cliff and screams at the beginning of Wild, and Vallée uses the sound of her voice to cut to a shot of her mother staring into the camera and doing the same. Later, a song plays on a car radio, and Cheryl’s mind, trying to glue itself back together, shifts back to her mom humming the tune in her kitchen. These choices don’t only deliver crucial backstory, they reveal how memories can fracture time, becoming living, breathing tendrils that cross great distances to ail us in the present.
He delivered narrative through corrosive flashbacks — not gentle lapses, but memories that bleed into the now. In Wild, young Cheryl runs through a store multiple times during the movie before the final visit to this night in her childhood is allowed to run longer. The last time Cheryl flashes back to it, we see additional footage of her running out of the store and into the shelter of mother’s beater car, where she sits bleeding from the abuse inflicted on her by Cheryl’s father.
Vallée often showed key moments more than once, each time revealing a new layer. The effect slowly chips away at the characters’ psyches. The memories mostly deliver tone, being vague enough to draw us in without revealing everything. But when the breaking point came, and it always did with these characters, the past would come crashing down like a heavy weight. Images would infiltrate, and could not be stopped. Characters would have to reckon with the full scope of their experiences, whereas previously they could only stand to remember little bits at a time.
It also provides a unique avenue for characterization, evidenced by Cheryl’s mother in Wild and Camille’s mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson) in Sharp Objects. Cheryl’s history is filled in using these unfurling echoes, which also paint a vivid picture of Bobbi, who we only meet through Cheryl’s eyes. Despite already knowing she died, the emotional heft of Wild gets more pervasive with each recollection of her mother’s kind eyes and selfless heart. Every bit of information serves a clever purpose, and nothing is wasted. With Adora, the additional context poisons us against the stoic, steely woman. Adora is alive in Sharp Objects, but she’s unknowable, so Camille’s blurry visions of her teenage years are used to drip feed Adora to us. It’s an incredibly personal means of storytelling, because we’re experiencing the world through subjective narration.
Big Little Lies in particular demonstrated Vallée was a multi-hyphenate (he edited and directed Dallas Buyers Club, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Editing). Season 1 was edited by David Berman, Maxime Lahaie, Sylvain Lebel, and Jim Vega, with Vallée heavily involved in the nuances because of how crucial the editing was to the show’s winning formula.
In an Art of the Cut interview, Vallée’s team explained his use of “thought cuts” — quick visual cuts triggered by a character’s internal conversation. Big Little Lies used shots of crashing waves to represent increasing tension, then later female solidarity as an unstoppable force. The series finale is when the disparate B-footage of waves suddenly makes all the sense in the world. The women band together to fight off an attacker, as crashing water intersperses with the violence brewing. “He doesn’t realize he’s fighting something as strong as the ocean,” Vallée explained, confirming the purpose of the water imagery.
Nowhere was this style more pointed than in Sharp Objects, where it visualized Camille’s fractured psyche. “With Sharp Objects — the book versus the series — we came up with this idea in post of ‘How is she going to feel her words on her body like she does in the book?’” Vallée shared. “We came up with this idea, from her perspective only: every time she feels a word on her legs, breast, or her stomach, we’re going to see the word for a flash, and then we will cut to a narrative perspective — the storytelling perspective — or another character’s perspective. We (the audience) won’t see the word.” These little moments in Sharp Objects are so quick you could blink and miss them. The camera refuses to linger on them, often pushing focus away after a second. But the result is brilliant, because we’re experiencing the story both unreliably and objectively. Those cuts are efficient, but they reveal so much about Camille’s inner world and her pain.
While memory is frequently untrustworthy, in Vallée’s fiction it’s the great deliverer of truths – usually secrets characters are not ready to reckon with. Big Little Lies’ biggest moment was when Jane looked at her friend’s husband, Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), and the footprints on the beach we had seen so many times finally led somewhere — to him. The violence Jane suffered at his hands sharpens into view, as the consequence of that insight ripples through the group.
For Cheryl in Wild, her moment of truth is facing every shameful mistake she made in the wake of her mother’s death, and choosing to accept them so she can start again. Camille’s is when she wakes up to the reality of Adora’s Munchausen by proxy syndrome, and decides to save her half-sister Amma from the same fate. They could only do these things by confronting the full breadth of their suffering, by staring it in the face and allowing it to momentarily crush them. Vallée’s approach is grounded in empathy and a genuine interest in how patriarchy (a main character itself in these stories) affects women. He delicately balances these ideas without stepping into soapy trauma-porn.
Vallée used to jump on the opportunity to tell two stories at once, before deciding at some crucial juncture in the narrative to hammer home a point. It was unity and the power of mother nature in Big Little Lies, ending sickly cycles in Sharp Objects, and accepting pain as part of the human condition in Wild. Through all of them, despite being written by different individuals, there’s Vallée’s signature through line: we’re ever-shifting creatures, with the ability to rearrange ourselves and our worst moments to create a viable future worth living.
He had a gift for conveying interiority. The characters he created and adapted were defined partly by their environments, and what they saw in their mind’s eye. We gleamed as much from his films’ repetitive, hypnotic visual storytelling as we did from dialogue. Perhaps he enjoyed adapting novels because he excelled where other filmmakers struggle in bringing the inner-monologue of books to life; written media has an internal aspect movies struggle to replicate without relying on a narration of some kind. However, this is where skilled editors and cinematographers pull their weight — cuts and light fill in the missing pieces that would be spelled out for us in a book.
If I’m not reminded of Vallée while hanging laundry or hiking a particularly beautiful path, I’m reminded when I reread this quote from Henri Nouwen: “Real grief is not healed by time. It is false to think that the passing of time will slowly make us forget her and take away our pain,” he wrote in A Sorrow Shared. “If time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so present that we take it for granted. Therefore, it is often only in retrospect — or better, in memory — that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.”
