Wild, 2014.
Directed by Jean-Marc Valle.
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Gaby Hoffman and Kevin Rankin.
SYNOPSIS:
Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) takes on the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail to help focus her life after the death of her mother.
There are times that Wild threatens to become the film everyone assumes it is, based on the trailer. Take, for instance, any scene where Cheryl comes into contact with the opposite sex. There’s always a tense exchange of dialogue, and in one scene, a vague threat of sexual assault. Yet, it’s always either played down or just dissipates, once Cheryl realises that the man in question is practically harmless.
It’s a strange thing to bring up in a movie, that, had it being adapted by anyone other than Nick Hornby, would have taken a little creative license and made said scenes a bit more…unsettling.
Yet, Wild isn’t the bleak, yet somehow life affirming trip into nothing that was Into the Wild. Neither is it the ‘one person against the jaws of nature’ that was 127 Hours – and it’s not even Eat Pray Love.’ Yes, there are scenes that seem tailor made for an Oscar show-reel, and every edit seems to have being made with Reese Witherspoon’s second statue at the forefront of their minds, but it’s well deserved and necessary, as she’s in pretty much every frame of Wild, because the film is about her.
Wild is based on the true story of Cheryl Strayed, who fell into a life of hard drugs and promiscuity after the death of her mother, and decided to trek the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail to make way for a fresh start.
Directed by Jean Marc Valle, who pointed two statues in the direction of McConaughey and Jared Leto in last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, he employs the same techniques of hand held cameras and steady landscape shots to present the film as a sort of docu drama. At times, the film even seems resemble the work of David Lynch and Gaspar Noe – shown through flashbacks and quick cuts that are only more vivid thanks to the presence of Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother.
But, being an Oscar contender, there’s obviously going to be a few eye rolling moments. Take, for example, Cheryl’s inner monologue. At first, it’s used as a source of comic relief with ‘you can quit at any time’ repeated ad nausea 3 miles into the trail. Then, it sort of becomes distracting, as if Nick Hornby figured that audiences wouldn’t be invested enough in her story after all the shots of her shooting up and having sex with anyone who asks – so he decided to make her think random thoughts about food, animals and her mother. Yes, it’s effective, but we already know the stakes thanks to the flashbacks and we don’t need them drilled into us throughout the film. It would have been better to let the setting speak for itself – silence speaks louder than words, after all.
But maybe it’s not a fault with Nick Hornby’s script. Written as if it could be performed on stage as a one woman show, he permeates the landscapes and vistas to find the woman that’s a blip amongst it all. It might overuse certain tropes, but it all serves a purpose, even if some of those are perfectly obvious.
Wild does a good job of letting us know just how dangerous the Pacific Crest Trail can be, however. If the opening shot of Reese Witherspoon removing a toe nail doesn’t get to you, than her exchange with a woman at a cosmetics shop certainly will.
Again, this is Reese Witherspoon’s movie, and there are undoubtedly some people who will say that they didn’t know that she had it in her. Those people need to watch Mud, right now.
About as vulnerable and fragile as anyone can get, she forgoes vanity for the sake of realism. There’s no doubt that she might have actually walked the trail alone just in preparation for the film, and it’s another amazing transformation, that, while not as drastic as McConaughey’s was in Dallas Buyers Club, should help Jean-Marc Valle’s reputation as an ‘actors director.’
Recently, there’s being an outcry about ‘strong’ female characters. For films where women aren’t simply eye candy and have some meaty roles. This is one of the best examples, yet Cheryl is far from ‘strong’. Determination and some misplaced sense of loyalty keeps her going – the scene where she first attempts to wear her pack is Wild in a nutshell – and those are the themes hammered into us by flashbacks and inner monologues.
One thing that didn’t sit right with me was Cheryl’s celebrity along the trail. Marking guest books with quotations from poetry and musings, she’s treated as if she wrote Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening‘, rather than simply quoting that famous line.
Still, it’s one of a few minor misteps in a film that knows it’s audience of Academy voters all to well. Anchored by an amazing performance from Reese Witherspoon and assured direction from Jean Marc-Valle, this is Oscar bait that you can lose yourself in, rather than biting your tongue and begging for the show reel to stop.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Matthew O’Donnell
Originally published November 18, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
