Movie review 'Wild': Living on a thin line

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Michael Huisman, Thomas Sadoski
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Rating: 3 stars


Wild is the true-life story of Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon). Cheryl is a young woman caught in a self-destructive spiral of broken relationships and reckless drug usage. In an effort to get clarity on her life and free herself from her funk, she undertakes a trekking journey to the Pacific Crest Trail, a long course stretching from the North to the South of the Pacific Coast of the United States of America.

On her journey, she meets with several challenges and misadventures, while at the same time reminiscing through flashbacks about her youth with her mother Barbara (Laura Dern) and her ex-husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski).

Will there ever be a movie about the happy backpacker, optimistic trekker and cheerful mountaineer? That is to say movies where trekkers and hikers go trekking and hiking because they like trekking and hiking and not because they believe the journey will solve their spiritual crisis. It seems to me that such movies uses melodrama to substitute a plot of surmounting physical obstacles with real character development.

In the case of this film, we have Cheryl whose life as the flashbacks reveal is a real sob story. In her wilderness journey, she has to deal with the facts of trekking — maintaining food and water supplies, learning how to heat a stove and camp in the middle of nowhere and what to do when supplies dry up and water runs out.

As a woman trekking alone, there’s also the fear of rape and suspicion of strangers bringing gifts. She has to constantly be alert, literally be on her toes (which as the first scene reveals cracks because of the poor quality mountaineering shoes she wears) but her refusal to continue with her trek quickly earns her the awe and admiration of her fellow trekkers.

The flashbacks however show the life that Cheryl has left behind. And there she comes across as a far less admirable person, a good deal pettier and a great deal selfish. It’s also the more interesting person. Throughout the entire film, Reese Witherspoon’s performance is good enough that that there is an ambiguity about Cheryl’s journey. It isn’t quite clear that she will actually make it through the journey alive and in one piece, and there’s also the sense of the odyssey through the Pacific Crest Trail stemming from a desire for a death wish.

Wild is a film with a weak beginning, but it gets better in the second half of the film and finishes strongly. The story structure narrated through multiple flashbacks is elegantly interwoven with the present day story of Cheryl’s trek. The film is more about character than plot and the flashbacks aren’t confusing as a result.

As a director, Jean-Marc Vallée introduces a few questionable touches. A soundtrack that grates with the noises of packing items into bags, a musical score that rather sentimentally fixates on Simon and Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa, pointless title cards telling us irrelevant information. The film’s focus on Cheryl means that the wilderness setting doesn’t quite come alive outside of establishing shots and there’s a general lack of visual beauty.

The film works well on account of the performances. Reese Witherspoon has been highly underrated as an actress for several years after her breakthrough performance in Alexander Payne’s Election. Possessing a wonderful comic touch and great earthy charm in the vein of classic actresses like Judy Holliday, she brings warmth and likability to Cheryl she also answers the physical rigors of trekking and mountaineering well.

Her gifts in physical comedy also come out well in the repeated gags of her lifting up her heavy backpack (called The Monster by fellow trekkers). The real reason why her character is likeable is that she invites ridicule and braves it. Above all, in a hilarious scene with a snooty journalist who calls her a “Female Hobo” that’s worth seeing the film alone.

Laura Dern is wasted in the flashback only scenes as Cheryl’s mother, the intimacy and awkward conversations they share, in addition to the sense of overwhelming sadness makes them the best scenes of the film. The overall theme of the prodigal daughter who wants to be woman her mother raised her is genuinely affecting.

The cliché of the “journey being more important than the destination” is true of Wild. The film works best in its small vignettes than it does in the overall plot. Luckily, there are several vignettes of such kind in the film to make it a redeeming movie-going experience on the whole.

The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society