Wild

Film (2014)

With Reese Witherspoon (Cheryl), Laura Dern (Bobbi)

Cheryl Strayed lost her beloved mother in 1991 and in 1995 at the age of 26 took on, as a totally novice hiker, the 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail (which runs from northern Washington to southern California) as a cathartic cure of sorts.

This is at once an account of a long hike, and so, naturally of interest to hikers, and also a story of recovery.

Tellingly, after the initial unfamiliarities of getting ready for and embarking on this hike run their course, the main threats are strange men. They show up everywhere, and its remarkable how well Wild shows their weirdnesses.

It’s not the wild we have to worry about, the film compellingly suggests, but the repressed and awful aggressive energies that some people can harbor within themselves.

The well-publicized initial scene of Cheryl trying to get on an overloaded pack is priceless. Anyone who hikes, and particularly, anyone who knows anything about “through hiking” – the hiking of very long distance trails such as the Pacific Crest or Appalachian – will find this enormously entertaining. It’s histrionic and overdone to the hilt, but still lots of fun.

Reese Witherspoon does a surprisingly good job as Cheryl.

It’s hard to totally get the prim and polished Witherspoon out of one’s mind after her early objectification in Legally Blonde (2001), so this is an interesting and welcome departure. She does not seem at all out of character in the current role; a background persona as well-groomed and a mite uptight serves as a good template. That she comes out of that persona and embarks, successfully, in this film, on an adventure in acting depicting a challenging outdoor adventure is a compelling combination.

As Cheryl’s mother, Laura Dern does a spectacularly evocative turn – lovingly exuberant – sometimes so much so that one wonders, at the outset of the portrayal, whether she is in her right mind. She is, and her conveyance of the character is so vital and vivid that it is completely understandable that losing her would make Cheryl feel she needed something like the Pacific Crest Trail to help her heal.

This is a great movie for hikers and, with Tracks (2014), the recent film about Robyn Davidson, who hiked across the Australian desert in the 1970s, makes a real celebration of daring women adventurers, determined, resilient, and willing to strike out to experience the natural world independently. Along the way, both women encounter helpful souls, some of them men, but some truly unhelpful and awful ones, most of them men as well.

– BADMan