Wild (4/5 Stars)

Best-selling memoirs based on a solitary exploration of one’s self can be apt for cynical ridicule. Take the example of whoever wrote “Eat Pray Love.” Once I heard that she was paid upfront to write a book about going on an exotic vacation to become enlightment I sort of lost all interest. I mean how can someone plan enlightenment and what kind of enlightment could it possibly be it was already in he works to sell the experience. I can give Thoreou a pass for ‘Walden’ because of its novelty; there was no expectation that it would make money. I can also give a pass to Christopher McCandless from ‘Into the Wild’ because somebody else wrote that story about him. He was not about to share it with the world. Finally I am going to give a pass to Cheryl Strayed whose bestselling book ‘Wild’ was the basis for this movie. The main reason is that even though this is a chronicling of her hike on the 1,000-mile Pacific Crest Trail, the heart of the story is not really about her. It is about the untimely death of her mother, which precipitated in Cheryl a self-destructive cycle of heroin addiction. Her hike and the book she wrote about it was an attempt to for lack of better words, get over it.

This movie was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee and adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby in a surprisingly cinematic way given that Hornby is a novelist (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and not a screenwriter. What is not surprising is that the movie’s writing has a preternatural sense of rhythm to it, one of Hornby’s distinctive strengths. Many lines of story are blended together with the main voyage of the Pacific Crest Hike with flashbacks and past dialogue and music coming in and out in a seemingly unorganized (but actually very probably meticulously organized) way. It feels like you are on a hike. You know, you are walking alone along a path in the wilderness. Everything is quiet but your thoughts and they meander in and out from present thinking, past memories, and the music you are playing in your head. I think Nick Hornby has done a very wonderful job of adapting a story that could easily be stilted and confining into something that feels like a seamless meditation of past, present, and a little of the future. If the book is anything like the movie in terms of structure, I would be very interested in reading it.

Anchoring the movie is Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed. This is one of those roles that basically guarantee an Oscar Nomination if it is done competently. Reese pulls off a competent performance and probably will be nominated. She does two things particularly well. One seems less about acting but deserves some recognition anyway and that is hiking around a movie set in the wilderness with a 50lb backpack. Reese happens to be 5’1” and movie star thin so there is that. The second has to do with being 38 years old and playing a young twenty-something character. This has less to do with having wrinkles than it is about inhabiting a person who is not mature the way that Reese Witherspoon obviously is in real life (a producer of this film actually) and more importantly in the movie roles she generally gets. This is most readily apparent in scenes opposite Cheryl’s mother (wonderfully inhabited by Laura Dern). The mother obviously adored and glowingly remembered by the child, is a bittersweet portrait. After escaping an abusive marriage, she started over with two kids, supported herself, went back to school (at the same high school as Cheryl) and somehow had a good attitude about it all. Then at age 41 she developed cancer. The doctor told her she had a year to live. She died within a month. And Cheryl absolutely grieved off the deep end of her life. This aspect of the story is what allows it to sidestep the memoir trap I mentioned above. Cheryl Strayed was not motivated to experience the journey as a quest of self-fulfillment but as a way to try to recapture the strength of those she had around her and lost. The story is not so much about her as a strong person as it is about the people in her life she drew strength from. And that lack of self-aggrandizement is what makes the commercialization of the story okay.

There is one other aspect of this movie that needs mentioning and it is in direct contrast to the most obviously comparable movie, Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild.” That too was about a person going into the wild alone, meeting new people, and pushing physical limits. One of the main differences though is that “Into the Wild” was about a young man whereas “Wild” is about a young woman. Without seeing this movie I would not have expected the most noticeable discrepancy is the overwhelming fear of sexual assault in the latter. Meeting new people for Christopher McCandless is a genrally pleasant experience. He gets drunk with Vince Vaughn. He talks philosophy with wanderers. He crashes a barbeque of a couple in the Grand Canyon. These same sorts of encounters happen in “Wild” but first Cheryl has to figure out if the person she is meeting is potentially dangerous. This is constant for every meeting. It really distracts away from watching the scenery. I wish it would just be paranoia on the side of Cheryl and almost all of the guys she meets in the movie (and it is mostly all guys on this trail) are totally cool. But then she does meet this one asshole and it turns out that it is a good idea for Cheryl to be cautious all the time. Come on people, this is why we can’t have nice things.