Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, and Michele Huisman
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Runtime: 115 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2015
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This American biographical film is based loosely on the Memoir, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail”, written in 2012 by Cheryl Strayed.
It tells the story of a woman, who hiked alone for 1,100 miles from Mojave, California to the Oregon-Washington border of the US, along the Pacific Crest Trail. In the title role as Cheryl Strayed, Reese Withersppon has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in the 2015 Academy Awards.
In the film, Witherspoon plays the part of a divorced woman, who feels acutely the failure of her marriage to her husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski), and who has led a life of destructive behaviour.
Grieving at the death of her mother (Laura Dern, who is excellent in the role) and guilty about her past, she attempts the huge trek with no great experience at handling, or coping with, its challenges. On the walk, for example, she needs to read sets of printed instructions before she can work the equipment that she is taking. The walk frustrates her, pushes her to her physical and psychological limits, but ultimately turns her into a more self-contained and stronger person. The film is essentially the depiction of the growth to independence of a strong-willed, adventurous young woman, desperate to discover herself, and start life afresh.
Witherspoon is almost in every frame of the movie and realistically portrays the hardship of a person undertaking a perilous journey. Her acting effectively conveys strong determination and personal vulnerability. To convey that vulnerability the film, along the way, shows her (as Strayed) recalling scenes from her past life. Those scenes show a life fuelled by drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, betrayal of a husband, and an inability to personally cope with conflicted and ambivalent feelings about a dying mother.
Despite its best intentions, the film plays out the morally superficial theme that the best way of “finding yourself” is to “lose yourself”. The movie plays the theme well, and Wiltherspoon is convincing as Strayed. However, the subtle intricacies of finding redemption through discovering independence are left to the viewer’s imagination rather than the power of the drama that actually unfolds on the screen.
The combination of good acting, excellent photography, and tight scripting make the movie an enjoyable one. Even if the moral path to redemption is not the display of determination and “true grit”, the film presents an image of finding independence that is impressive.
Shots of the scenery are breath-taking and full of pictorial splendour. The cinematography captures the vastness and expansiveness of the American Wilderness superbly. We are shown threatening snow drifts, cascading rivers, vast open plains, and forbidding mountain crevices that are awe-inspiring. They pose challenges that test severely anyone’s will to survive. Given the force of their effect, however, the film spends a lot of time nostalgically reminiscing about Strayed’s moments of dissolution, which Witherspoon acts intensely. Off the track, the viewer is exposed to some strong sex and drug scenes.
This is a movie that spreads Strayed’s past too widely, but it tells a compelling story set in the midst of majestic scenery. Hiking may not be the best way to solve deep, personal problems, but the ecology of the American wilderness provides a marvellous escape from worrying about them.
At its core, this film is an entertaining adventure tale about the resilience of the human spirit. Despite some quick-fire judgements, presumably echoing Strayed’s reflections, at its end, the film fails to convince on its main moral points. However, it exposes the viewer effectively and dramatically to scenes of human survival against compelling environmental odds.
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