Wild (2014)

"Wild" at Heart: Reese Witherspoon plumbs
the depths of pain along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Somewhere along her extraordinary 1,100 mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) pauses to tend to a sore foot and ends up inadvertently knocking one of her boots over the edge, sending it tumbling hundreds of feet down the side of a steep mountain. Unable to retrieve it from the abyss below, she lets out a feral, expletive-laced scream of frustration while launching the second, now useless shoe over the cliff.

It’s a brief step in the wrong direction for the main character, but fortunately, the outstanding film about her has no such flaws. Based on Strayed’s first person memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the movie version of “Wild”—a spellbinding and masterful biopic directed by Jean-Marc Vallee from a screenplay by Nick Hornby—finds the right note from the opening scene and never steps wrong.

Unable to cope with life and still brutally mourning the death of her mother (Laura Dern) four years earlier, Cheryl, at 26, divorces her husband and leaves home in Minnesota, setting off for Southern California with a hulking backpack of supplies. Despite not being an experienced hiker, she immerses herself in a perilous, solitary walk—Strayed would later call it a journey of self discovery—beginning in the dangerous heat of the Mojave Desert, traversing the snowy mountains of Northern California, and finishing, ninety-four days later, in the rainy wilderness of the Oregon-Washington border.

We learn more about Cheryl’s turbulent, often agonizing past through the film’s distinctive, hypnotic use of flashbacks, which often spring suddenly from images that seem to pop up and ambush Cheryl’s mind. There’s the strong bond with her struggling but wise mother ("You've got to find your best self,” she tells Cheryl at one point, “and when you do, hold on to it for dear life"); the devastating illness that quickly and cruelly claims her mother’s life at an early age; and later, Cheryl’s self destructive plunge into a dark world of cynicism, meaningless sex and heroin use.

If some of the themes in “Wild” are about coping with grief and the fragility of life, the grueling physical journey at its center becomes the ultimate visual metaphor for Cheryl's struggle to find psychological and spiritual clarity. It’s a task she accomplishes by facing her fears on the trail, but also—in a nod to the creative process—by facing her memories through journal writing.

So much of the film is just Cheryl hiking along, breathlessly making her way along the trek, alone with her thoughts. The outdoor imagery is never less than exquisite—Vallee captures the beauty and scope of the rugged landscape with lovely and lyrical wide screen compositions—but it’s the emotions and memories (often beautiful, at times inscrutable, sometimes haunting) that make “Wild” stirring and powerfully moving.

With movies like “Legally Blonde,” Reese Witherspoon has been operating beneath her capability for a long time. But here, she fully showcases her wide range of expression—perfectly and fiercely conveying shades of contempt and desperation, vulnerability and fear, sadness and rage—in a gritty, uncompromising and brilliant performance. Those who've been waiting patiently since "Election" for her to get a role to really sink her teeth into are finally rewarded with one of the finest performances by an actress in recent memory.

“She was the love of my life,” Cheryl says to someone at one point, about the woman who was taken away from her too soon. “Wild” is a love letter to the lives of people that touch us deep enough to make us want to walk a mile, or a thousand, just to keep thinking about them.