If “Foxcatcher” presents a tragedy of lofty aspirations gone horribly wrong, “Wild” gives audiences an
inspirational tale of finding strength from within. While director Jean-Marc Vallรฉe’s “Dallas Buyers Club,” left me cold, his new film is intimate and honest in a way that that film wanted to be but never was.
Stripped of her usual pluckiness, Reese Witherspoon portrays Cheryl Strayed, a young woman who decides to hike 1000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, taking her from Mexico to Canada over the course of a three-month journey (the film is based on Strayed’s own memoir, adapted by author Nick Hornby).
Using cross-cutting and overlapping dialogue and images, Vallรฉe visualizes Strayed’s inner
thoughts, showing us her memories as they echo through her mind, filling us in
on the experiences which led her down this path. Strayed is at the tail end of
a downward spiral that ended with the dissolution of her marriage, brought on
by her compulsive cheating and nasty heroin habit. These behaviors were
all methods she utilized to cope with the death of her beloved mother (a
fantastic Laura Dern); the hike is her attempt to
find herself again, and unburden herself of the emotional baggage which nearly
succeeded in burying her completely.
The film’s early going earns a lot of laughs through Strayed’s inexperience (her comically overstuffed backpack
becomes legendary amongst her fellow hikers, who dub it “the monster”), and
gains power as it charts her progress toward self-acceptance. Witherspoon
embraces the darkness and gives a remarkable performance, letting us see the
actress in a new light; Strayed is a mess in a way that the actress has never
allowed audiences to see before (Witherspoon named her production company “Type
A” for a reason). She’s frequently unlikable and in many of the flashbacks
she’s hard on her mother, critiquing her choices and the way she maintains an
optimistic (Cheryl calls it naive) outlook even when facing down some of the
worst that life has to offer.
Though it ends with a voiceover from Strayed that’s a little
too heavy-handed in spelling out the movie’s themes, Hornby’s screenplay mostly
succeeds in sidestepping the saccharine aspects that weigh down lesser
“uplifting” films. Anchored by Witherspoon’s great work, “Wild” emerges is an
incredibly moving portrayal of a person’s capability to overcome seemingly
insurmountable grief and come out the other side all the stronger for it.
Click here for local showtimes for “Wild” in Rochester movie theaters
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2014.
