Like the memoir on which it’s based, Jean-Marc Vallee’s Wild opens with Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), a 26-year-woman escaping a life of self-destruction by hiking 1,100 miles on California’s brutal Pacific Crest Trail, in a jam. She’s just witnessed one of her boots tumble down a cliff, never to be seen again. In a fit of understandable rage, she tosses the other boot down into the same abyss. It’s an apt metaphor: She’s shoeless on the trail, rudderless in life, lacking the support to press forever onward.
Vallee’s film differs in that, even one minute into the picture, his version is already more sensationalist. We see the damage that her boots — one size too small — have inflicted on her feet. She’s forced to rip off a bloody toenail, as the film’s audience shrivels in discomfort. In Hollywood as in the press, it bleeds, therefore it shall lead.
The more we see of Wild, the more this prologue seems like a pandering teaser. It tempts us with agonizing desperation that never materializes. It’s a hook cast without any bait — a blatantly commercial decision to grip us with queasy jolts before settling into a more tranquil, contemplative, faithful narrative of personal enlightenment.
It’s difficult to avoid comparing the film to John Curran’s Tracks, another 2014 fact-based drama about a young woman embarking on a taxing journey into nature’s unforgiving landscapes — in the latter’s case, a camel-assisted trek through the Australian desert. But while Tracks drew much of its appeal and its mystery from the fuzzy motives and general inscrutability of its protagonist, Wild devotes half its screen time to backstory.
True to Strayed’s book, Wild is a temporal journey as much as a geographic one. Three months alone with nature, with minimal human contact, breed self-reflection, and Cheryl’s past frequently revisits in the form of sense memories, mostly of the four traumatic years between her mother’s cancer diagnosis and the beginning of her curative, cleansing hike — a period in which she destroys her health and her marriage in a destructive spiral of heroin addiction and anonymous sex (the author’s surname is a literary double entendre so obvious no fiction writer would dare invent it, an irony not lost on Strayed herself).
These scenes carry the blurry, incomplete veneer of reductionism: glimpses of needles puncturing veins, bodies in compromising sexual positions, crack-house extractions and relationship discord delivered only in fragments, as if out of tastefulness or a false sense of modesty. Vallee and his screenwriter, Nick Hornby (stepping out of his comfort zone, one imagines), could have explored these painful memories more thoroughly — or perhaps, in a bolder stroke, eschewed them altogether.
At any rate, Wild is strongest when cataloguing Cheryl’s odyssey and the characters she encounters en route. An energetic reporter from a self-described “hobo magazine” treats her like a roadside attraction, snapping her photograph, “interviewing” her and speeding away; a little boy sings an elegiac rendition of “Red River Valley.” Other women are as rare as spotted owls. Mostly she encounters men, alone or in small groups, whose complements of her appearance usually sound more lascivious than cordial, the threat of rape hanging over the film’s proceedings like an ever-present menace. The results of these encounters are suspenseful and surprising.
Witherspoon, subjected to lugging a 65-foot backpack for much of the shoot — her comic attempt to don the overstuffed behemoth for the first time resembles a wrestling match with a wild animal — dirties herself up for the vulnerable part, her body pockmarked with welts and lesions. Oscar will love it, and the Academy will likely also bestow a nomination for Laura Dern as her mother Bobbi, an abused wife turned single mom, an eternal optimist who contracted cancer at 45, just when she was finally beginning to self-actualize.
One of the hard, implicit truths in Wild is that we don’t fully appreciate people like her until they’re gone — and they could go at any moment. Regret, shame, struggle, divorce, addiction, disease: Wild tackles the stuff of life we’d rather not speak about. Imperfect though it may be at translating this material, it’s a journey worth taking.
WILD. Director: Jean-Marc Vallee; Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, Keene McRae, Gaby Hoffman; Distributor: Fox Searchlight; Rating: R; Opens Friday at most area theaters