Cheryl Strayed's best-selling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail suggested to more than a million readers that the way to tame inner demons is to redefine what it means to navigate a wild life. Jean-Marc Vallee, the director of last year's Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club, has adapted Strayed's book into a beautiful and gritty film with a transformative performance by Reese Witherspoon at its core.
The film recreates Strayed's 1,100 mile trek from from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to the border with Washington State. After a divorce and the death of her beloved mother (an ethereal Laura Dern), Strayed made the journey in an effort to find the Cheryl she had somehow lost.
Listen to related content: New Letters on the Air's interview with Cheryl Strayed.
As a way of coping with her losses and grief, Strayed became entangled in a mess made out of her own poor choices. Shooting up heroin and having anonymous, multi-partnered sex in grimy alleys, she seems to behave blithely yet within a suit of armor, and running contrary to her smarts and potential. Unlike other memoirs in the genre, this one may be more self-incriminating than self-preserving, not always flattering of its heroine.
It works as well as it does because Witherspoon dares to give audiences a Witherspoon they're not used to. Her performance is steeped with pain and determination, courageous in its depiction of intravenous drug use and graphic sexuality — she's comfortable being antisocial and disagreeable at times. Still, you root for her. What gives the film its art-house sheen is the way Vallee shuns chronological storytelling: It's more a Jackson Pollock splatter painting than a Thomas Hart Benton mural. As if to reflect Strayed’s dissipated life, the images on screen can, in a few minutes, cross time from that dusty path of the present to her unhealthy recent past and back even further to a tough childhood growing up watching men mistreat her spiritual yet fallible mother – a pattern she would be all too doomed to repeat.
Wild | Dir. Jean-Marc Vallee | 119 min.| Opens Dec. 19
