Wild
(2014)
Jean-Marc Vallée’s follow-up to the mostly very good Dallas Buyers Club adapts Cheryl
Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the
Pacific Crest Trail, documenting her 1995 trek that’s all in the memoir’s
title. Somehow, along the way, Cheryl’s gained a decade and turned in Reece
Witherspoon, who is very good, just not 27. The end result is an agreeable if
generic travelogue, delivering the expected combination of self-discovery and
explanatory flashbacks.
Witherspoon’s Strayed elects to trek 1,100 miles of the
trail following a divorce and, in the previous few years, the death of her
mother and subsequent descent into addiction and wanton abandon. I’ve seen it
said that Vallée’s approach here is anti-commercial due to its “free associative, memory-driven narrative”,
but that’s really crediting him with too outré a style; this seemed like an
entirely conventional device to me, supplying the viewer with sufficient information
to keep the nature of her past intriguing, and ensuring it reveals itself in
the manner of pieces in a jigsaw. It also does its darnedest to move the viewer
in a calculated manner at times, oddly for a film that is attempting to be unvarnished
(Cheryl’s encounter with a boy hiking with his grandma and her llama, and the
song the kid sings her).
So too, Cheryl’s realisations and triggers frequently feel
less than profound; compared to the bleak side of this kind of trip found in
other true-life dramatisations Into the
Wild, or the profound and inspiring one in Tracks, Wild doesn’t
really stand out. It might be said that such small, ordinary gains are the
point, but it also leads to a feeling of déjà vu; many of the incidents could
be slotted into any tale, from trouble with footwear and cooking, to encounters
with kindly folk who are assumed to be threatening, to threatening folks who are threatening, to (purportedly)
similarly-aged lads who are friendly but shallow.
Even if Cheryl doesn’t understand why she’s on the trail,
Vallée
does, punctuating every incident with remembrances and the pain of loss, ghosts
that haunt her as she steers a path to a form of self-acceptance; maybe that’s
down to Nick Hornby’s screenplay, since he has a knack of being a safe but
literal pair of hands (the final narration forms something of an ungainly bow
to wrap things up).
But Witherspoon is engaging, and Cheryl’s progress from hopelessly
ill prepared to seasoned journeywoman is engaging enough. Yves Bélanger’s
cinematography also does its job taking in the beauty of the wilderness. There
are even odd moments of quirkiness, such as Mo McRae’s reporter for The Hobo
Times who is convinced, despite Cheryl’s protestations, that she is a rare
female hobo. Witherspoon is commendably uncossetted and exposed in the role,
and strong support is provided from mostly one-scene-and-out players, including
Laura Dern (as her unstintingly positive mother, okay, more than one scene), W
Earl Brown and Gaby Hoffman.
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