Wild
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Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski
Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée
Running time: 115 minutes
“Good luck.”
The words are spoken by Cheryl Strayed to Reese Witherspoon at the outset of Wild, Jean-Marc Vallée’s engaging adaptation of Strayed’s bestselling memoir about her 1700-km hike along the Pacific Crest Trail.
Strayed plays a pickup-truck driver, dropping herself (Witherspoon) off as she is about to embark on her journey. It’s a meta moment, and a winking acknowledgement of the perilous adventure Witherspoon and Vallée are embarking on.
It’s one thing to translate your own life-changing pilgrimage into words on a page. It’s another to take someone else’s literary tale of personal transformation and adapt it to the big screen.
To his credit, Vallée avoids most of the traps of such an endeavour — clichés about finding yourself and getting closer to nature. His Wild is gritty, starting with the opening scene in which Witherspoon provocatively grunts and moans her way to the top of a rock, ignoring the stunning vista to peel off a dangling toenail, losing her hiking boot to the abyss in the process before tossing the other one off in defiance, shouting, “F—k you, b—h!” at the top of her lungs.
And away we go.
Strayed’s pre-hike life was a mess. Caught in a vortex of drug and sex addiction, cheating on her husband and devastated by the death of her mother, she was imploding on every level.
So undertaking a 1700-km hike was a stretch, to say the least. Witherspoon portrays Strayed unromantically — there is a goofy, no-nonsense charm about her performance.
We sense that the great outdoors is not Strayed’s natural habitat (providing comic relief in early scenes as she finds her footing), but we also feel her need to push away from the world she has left behind, into the unknown.
Reese Witherspoon and director Jean-Marc Vallée filming on location for Wild.
Rather than get weighed down by a lengthy prologue, Vallée shows Strayed’s past experiences in snippets of flashback, as though they are things going through her head while she walks the trail.
She is tormented by the loss of her mother (played with great spirit and warmth by Laura Dern), whom she calls “the love of her life.” Footnote: Strayed’s younger self is played by the author’s 9-year-old daughter, Bobbi, named after her mom.
This is an all-too-rare woman’s story, and while Vallée jokingly inserts the word “feminist” in a lighthearted scene, halfway through, he also doesn’t shy away from the realities of being female. Strayed’s encounters with men are fraught with sexual tension, sometimes as a potential threat, or at least something to be negotiated with caution.
It’s a lot to pack into one movie, and Vallée does try to do too much; his film could have used a bit more space, free of flashbacks and encounters. But he has achieved something remarkable — a portrait of a conflicted woman who is not defined, or redeemed, by anyone but herself.
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