The Distinctive Visual Style Of ‘Sharp Objects’ Can Be Traced Back To ‘Wild’

Unsurprisingly, a female-driven, literary-based limited series on HBO directed by Jean-Marc Vallée has lodged itself into the cultural conversation once again. Like Big Little Lies last year, Sharp Objects stands out from other television offerings by emphasizing mood over plot, motifs over moments and interiority over explanation. At a slim 252 pages, the source novel from Gillian Flynn could easily have lent itself to a feature-length film, yet Vallée and showrunner Marti Noxon’s decision to let the story play out languorously over eight hours allows him to burrow deeper into the tortured psyche of Amy Adams’ protagonist Camille Preaker.

This approach is likely familiar to fans of art-house cinema but has only recently begun to penetrate the small screen, even as the prestige era has eschewed serialized plots in favor of methodical character development. Judging from the buzz on the first half of the series, Sharp Objects proves that Big Little Lies was no fluke – this impressionistic style is here to stay and likely to ripple through the television landscape for years to come.

But Vallée, who edits Sharp Objects in addition to directing and producing it, did not merely stumble upon this aesthetic. He’s been fine-tuning the fragmented narrative style over many projects this decade to varying degrees of payoff, but the first sign he could align all the moving parts was in 2014’s Wild, a film ripe for rediscovery on streaming. Making the case that a movie nominated for two Oscars and boasts a 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes needs to be “reclaimed” is a bit extreme, I’ll admit. But the film deserves better than its current categorizations: an Eat Pray Love-style narrative of white female self-discovery, lumped in with commonly derided “Oscar bait.”

For the first time, Vallée found a story that merited his editing style. The choppiness made Dallas Buyers Club, his film the year prior, slightly more interesting to watch, but the bells-and-whistles Vallée added in the cutting room amounted to little more than an artistic flourish. In Wild, however, his jagged editing rhythms convey the wandering mind of Witherspoon’s Cheryl Strayed as she undertakes hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. With no companion to keep her company, Cheryl’s thoughts are borne back ceaselessly into the banks of her memory. Rather than structuring her reveries in the unit of a regular scene, Vallée conveys her flashbacks as just that: brief flashes of the past.

Wild demonstrates Vallée’s perceptive translation of mental processes into images and montage. Our memories aren’t neatly compartmentalized; they’re hopelessly, messily intertwined. The film begins with a few stray glances back into Cheryl’s history, gradually yet gracefully introducing the stylistic conceit to the audience. At this point, it’s more about aligning expectations. As Vallée admits on the Wild commentary track, he added in a moment with Cheryl’s friend and confidant Amy (Gaby Hoffmann) primarily because “her presence needed to be felt earlier.” Traditional narrative logic be damned, she appears because it flows with the intrinsic emotional logic of Cheryl’s worried mind.

After easing into the style, Vallée begins providing context for the unexplained images through motivated flashbacks that explain why they still haunt Cheryl years later. Sometimes the connections are literal, like Cheryl testing out a whistle for the trail in her mouth and getting transported back to a promiscuous stretch where a man’s finger passed between those same two lips. Other times, the cut makes a more thematic connection between two moments, such as a shot of Cheryl shielding her ears from her whistle’s echo on the trail that immediately segues into her cowering from the withering criticisms from her ex-husband.

Through Wild, Vallée successfully hacks the style of cause and effect editing that men pioneered and perpetuated to tell their own narratives. In conflict-centric stories where a protagonist must take decisive steps to reach a resolution, an action in image A leads to a result in image B. More feminine narratives, which seek to learn rather than achieve, are crafted in opposition to this paradigm. Though Cheryl journeying towards the completion of her hike gives some structure to the film, simply crossing an arbitrary geographical line is not the goal toward which it progresses.

At risk of sounding like a cliché, Cheryl’s real destination in Wild is her coming to terms with her own past in order to forge a sustainable future. Perhaps we can never understand Cheryl Strayed’s decision to hike the Pacific Coast Trail in order to make peace with her decisions. Vallée never attempts to explain it. But we can feel it by experiencing the journey with her. The editing accomplishes this by treating Cheryl’s memories like musical motifs, notes that carry additional resonance with each repetition and only make full sense when considered in light of the whole body of work.

So the further we get into the twisted mind of Camille Preaker, the greater the debt of gratitude we owe to Cheryl Strayed. Sharp Objects picks up a stylistic baton from Big Little Lies, which itself received it in a hand-off from Wild. The film’s success provided a clear template with which Vallée has now launched two hit shows. And while it might just be a starting point, Wild still runs way ahead of the pack for films of its ilk.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Where to stream Wild