Dec 5, 2014
In the new movie “Wild,” a newly divorced woman named Cheryl Strayed - whose best-selling memoir the film is based upon - is trying to kick intense addictions to sex and heroin by walking over 1000 miles from the Mojave Desert to the Canadian border along the Pacific Coast Trail (known in the film and by hikers as the PCT). Played by Reese Witherspoon in a staggering performance that covers every part of the emotional spectrum and then some, Cheryl is a wounded soul who runs away from the others who have mired her life but is bravely forcing herself to face her internal anger and corruption head-on.
Cheryl grew up largely without a father after her mother (Laura Dern) fled her abusive alcoholic husband while Cheryl was a young child. That combination of no father and domestic chaos rubbed off on her in a way that leads to a string of empty sexual encounters and an addiction to heroin after her mother’s untimely early death from cancer, until her husband of seven years confronts her and they decide to divorce.
Once she has her divorce papers, Cheryl buys a ton of hiking and camping gear and sets off on the PCT. She takes three months to do it and learns many life lessons and skills along the way as she is shown bouncing between her solo walk and occasional encounters with strangers, and her vivid and sad flashbacks to a lifetime of havoc with her abusive dad, sweet but unstable mom, and illicit sex and drug use.
Director Jean-Marc Vallee does an impressive job of jumping between the present and the past, with the disturbingly shot and edited flashbacks giving viewers a fascinating look into a highly troubled woman’s mind. As the director of “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” he employed the same techniques to give glimpses into the haunted memories of Ron Woodruff, a straight man who contracted AIDS through using needles and having sex with prostitutes before redeeming himself by helping lead the fight for more effective drugs against HIV.
Both movies are uncompromising in these flashbacks, marking Vallee as a unique stylist who can make the darkest moments of the human soul riveting to watch. But he is matched here by Witherspoon in a performance that literally carries the movie as strongly as Cheryl carries her life in a 50 pound backpack.
Cheryl is a tough woman to sympathize with for much of the movie, as she is revealed throughout in the quick but graphic flashbacks to have been a dishonest, adulterous, argumentative drug abuser. And Witherspoon walks a tightrope, as she could have easily tipped so far into depicting wild behavior that the entire performance could have come off as showboating for an Oscar to match her Academy Award for “Walk the Line,” yet always stays just on the right edge of her travails in leading viewers on her quest. .
Viewers accustomed to regarding Witherspoon as an “America’s Sweetheart” type should be aware that despite its overall positive message of change and redemption - Strayed remarried and has children now - , this is a very hard-R movie. Between several nude scenes, flashes of graphic sex, an implied abortion or willful attempt to induce miscarriage, shooting up drugs and swearing profusely through the first two-thirds of the movie, it’s absolutely not for kids and might be too harsh for a good percentage of adults as well.
Yet Nick Hornby – the British novelist and screenwriter famous for guy-centered projects like “About A Boy” and “High Fidelity” – does an impressive job of mining Cheryl's mind, and the interior struggles of a deeply flawed person trying to set herself aright (albeit without traditional religion involved). And the cinematography by Yves Belanger, who also lensed “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” not only captures the darkness of Strayed’s past, but the glorious light into which she is emerging.