I swear I tried to take this movie seriously. Reese Witherspoon — who stars and produced — is attempting a professional makeover. I’m all for her. Jean-Marc Vallée, the guy who gave us Dallas Buyers Club, directed, so how can one not expect great things? The script, based on Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, was written by none other than Nick Hornby (High Fidelity). What could go wrong?
As I watched the actress pretend to hike the Pacific Crest Trail for two hours, I reminded myself I was viewing an official For Your Consideration award screener. That this means Wild is theoretically an awards-caliber, even Oscar-caliber, work. And yet, no matter how earnestly, how open-mindedly I considered Witherspoon’s screen journey, I kept finding myself humming the theme from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
That’s not mature. I know. But, in my defense, I think it only fair to point out that Wild is really kind of silly. Not that unfortunate things don’t happen to several of its characters. It’s just that Strayed, Hornby and Vallée don’t find much of significance to say about them. Certainly nothing one couldn’t find on a Hallmark card. In a lot less than two hours.
The problem is the source material. In the summer of 1995, when Strayed decided to walk 1,100 miles of the trail alone, she wasn’t a writer, a philosopher or even a hiker. She was a 26-year-old who had screwed up her life royally.
Following the death of her mother (played in flashbacks by Laura Dern), Strayed married the most understanding guy in movie history. His name is Paul, and he’s played in flashbacks by Thomas Sadoski. You know he’s the best husband ever from his reaction when Strayed inexplicably starts having sex with strangers and disappearing for days to shoot heroin in a drug den. He not only forgives her but later sends her letters at ranger stations along the trail that tell her how much he admires her. You can’t make up stuff like this. I’m pretty sure.
In her book, Strayed never managed to connect the motivational dots between her self-destructive behavior and the decision to take a long, difficult, potentially dangerous walk. So it’s no surprise the movie’s creators aren’t any more successful at making sense of her story.
Yves Bélanger’s cinematography is spectacular, and the old Paul Simon songs are great. But what exactly are we watching here — an act of atonement? Liberation? Self-discovery? Redemption? In one of the film’s way too many flashbacks, Strayed admits she hasn’t a clue why she’s doing this. Contrast her mind-set with those of the central figures in, say, Into the Wild or 127 Hours, and you can see how the movie might leave some viewers feeling like they’ve just endured a long slog to nowhere.
Witherspoon carries the film, along with a giant backpack, which — get it? — symbolizes her baggage. She turns in a performance that’s solid but not a lot more — again, owing to the limited richness of Strayed’s material. Wild chronicles the completion of a daunting physical challenge while intimating that it’s about something more spiritual, more meaningful.
I couldn’t find a lot of meaning in her journey, much less in her climactic epiphany. Maybe I’m missing something. You tell me. The film closes in voiceover with these words: “My life … mysterious, irrevocable, sacred. So very close, so very present. So very belonging to me. How wild it was to let it be.”
If you can make sense of that, then Wild‘s the movie for you. I’ll be honest: Even as I type this, I’m still humming the theme from Walk Hard.
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This article appears in The Winter Reading Issue 2014.
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Thank you for the honest review. I almost walked out, but kept hoping the movie would go deeper. It never did and I too found it silly and lacking any sort of emotion.
Well, it astounds me how you missed the motivation and the character DID say it: she was walking “to make herself clean.” Clean to forgive herself of her past and clean to finally grieve for her mother. By taking a solitary walk or hike, don’t we all do that? That’s what I gain with time alone in the woods – convening with nature and a refresh to my soul.
Also, as a woman, I found the events Cheryl experienced on the trail completely relatable (from encountering potentially dangerous men to the physical burdening of a pack). I also giggled at her novice backpacking errors, which fortunately from the wisdom of fellow Green Mountain Club members, I have managed to mostly avoid.
Yes, you were immature by humming the Dewey Cox theme in your head (a shoddy movie in which she didn’t even star nor did the low caliber parodying come close to resembling her character in Walk the Line.) Taking the movie from a joking perspective skewed your ability to see the beauty behind this wonderful movie.
Your review is the joke.
I had heard this was a good movie and was watching on my big screen at home. I had to turn it off after half an hour because it was so brutally boring!! Critics for the most part like this movie, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how it got a good review. I’ve watched a lot of bad movies before and usually find some redeeming factor like the cinematography, Plot or something but this movie at nothing.