Dropped straight into the seemingly hopeless nadir of Cheryl Strayed’s journey of redemption from the opening sequence, Reese Witherspoon sits atop a pine-flecked vista, pulls a toenail from her bloodied foot, and tosses one of her hiking boots down a ravine with an accompanying expletive. It’s funny, unbearable, cruel, but it’s not indicative of a film that leads you to many forks in the road, but doesn’t necessarily take you down the path you'd expected.
Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallee has taken the real life memoirs of Strayed and tapped into those incidental moments that make up life, and in doing so created a work of inspirational and relatable resonance that is much more than just a stellar welcome back performance from Reese Witherspoon.
Seemingly running away from heartbreak, drug addiction, and a fractured family unit, Cheryl Strayed (Witherspoon) decides to embark on a 1,100 mile solo hike across the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a landscape that takes in scorching deserts, snow capped mountains, the odd suspect hunter, and a flashback’s worth of demons for our repentant rambler to outpace.
The focus of the journey will undoubtedly be the leading lady, and deservedly so, because it’s an awards-worthy performance, the brilliance of which is that it never goes seeking such accolades. It’s subtle, unshowy, and absent of any clip-reel grandstanding.
Thanks to the best supporting inanimate actor since Cast Away’s Wilson – her huge backpack, nicknamed “monster” by other hikers – she is literally carrying the weight of her past, present, and future on her shoulders.
It’s a multi-faceted turn, earning your sympathy, disgust, and pity. As an audience you’re as conflicted about your feelings towards Cheryl as she is about her own self-reflective arc.
Fascinating, intriguing, and unable to second guess, Witherspoon makes Wild a film you'd be happy to walk a further 1,000 miles with.
The shards of life construction is also meticulously edited.
There’s the sparingly used, borderline preachy inner monologue, which flips from swear words to literary quotes, but is used as an insight to this tortured soul rather than a lazy narrative tool.
The meat of the story comes in a series of flashbacks woven between the peaks and troughs of her expedition. They range from Terence Malick style family vignettes featuring Laura Dern’s mother, to the grittier, sordid aspects of Cheryl’s past. None of them are superfluous or indulgent, with each a part of the shambolic patchwork of her life.
Director Vallee’s canvas looks stunning, with much of the praise going the way of Mother Nature, but he ensures shots are elegantly framed. He makes the most of vast expanses which accentuate the insignificance of Strayed’s progress, and equally so the streams of sunlight from a punctured dusk skyline during a moment of positive reflection.
If for some it does veer off into saccharine territory with the occurrence of supposed spirit animals, or the touching moment during which a small boy serenades our wanderer along her final few miles irritates, then perhaps you stepped off the path along the way, rather than losing yourself in this wonderful film.
‘Wild’
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Gaby Hoffmann, Laura Dern
Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Release date: Dec. 5
4 stars out of 5
Follow Matthew Rodgers on Twitter: @MainstreamMatt
