'Wild': Actress Reese Witherspoon delivers an impressive performance
鈥淲ild鈥� is based on Cheryl Strayed鈥檚 passionately funny-sad, Oprah-approved, bestselling 2012 memoir, but it doesn鈥檛 come across as a 鈥渟afe鈥� project. Reese Witherspoon, who plays Strayed, may be bucking for another Oscar 鈥� and just to make sure we know it, she doesn鈥檛 wear any makeup 鈥� but, as Hollywood movies go, it鈥檚 fairly uncompromising.
The movie, like the book, employs a back-and-forth flashback structure to depict Strayed鈥檚 1,100-mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State, which she undertook in the summer of 1995 when she was 26 and despairing from the death of her mother (well played by Laura Dern) and a broken marriage. (Strayed legally changed her surname from Nyland in 1995.) The hike began impulsively, as a way to break off bouts of sex and heroin addiction, and turned into a grueling soul-searching lasting more than three months.聽
Jean-Marc Vall茅e (鈥�Dallas Buyers Club鈥�), directing from a script by Nick Hornby, begins the movie right in the middle of the hike, with Strayed agonizing over a bloody toe in a too-tight boot. Her backpack, nicknamed 鈥渢he Monster,鈥� is almost as big as she is. In visual terms, Vall茅e is constantly pitting the diminutive Strayed against the broad expanse of the wilderness.聽
Danger is ever-present, not only from wild animals and rattlesnakes and parched landscapes and freak snowstorms, but also from the many men she encounters on the trail. (And the hikers are almost all men.) The sense of a single woman as prey has rarely been so chillingly conveyed in a movie (at least in a movie that wasn鈥檛 intended as a thriller).聽
Witherspoon uses her own undoubted discomfort with the physical demands of the role to make us feel Strayed鈥檚 predicament in our bones. (At one point our heroine slogs 20 miles to a water tank only to discover it鈥檚 empty.) The film is another in a series of memoiristic recent movies 鈥� along with 鈥淚nto the Wild,鈥� 鈥淎ll is Lost,鈥� and 鈥�127 Hours鈥� 鈥� about how confronting the wilderness outside compels a showdown with the wilderness within. What makes this one different is that Strayed doesn鈥檛 abide by the strong-and-silent ethic governing those films. The strongest emotion in the movie, her main motivating force, is the deep love she still holds for her mother.
Too much of 鈥淲ild鈥� is broken up by flashbacks that tend to dissipate rather than enhance Strayed鈥檚 trek. At times she is swallowed up almost to the point of vanishing by the immensity of the vistas. The various encounters she has along the way with hikers, both platonic and predatory, have a schematic feel, as if we were proceeding chapter by chapter through her journey.
I鈥檓 also not quite sure I buy the spiritual uplift Strayed derives from the hike鈥檚 completion. It could just be that she is naturally high from being royally pooped. But Witherspoon accomplishes a very difficult feat: Often wordlessly, she makes us understand how Strayed could be less lonely in the wild than in a city full of people. Grade: B (Rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language.)
