Wild

Runtime: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Quick Impressions:
Reese Witherspoon is having a pretty good year.  Her new production company seems to be working out.  Both fall movies that she’s produced—Gone Girl and Wild—are overwhelming favorites for Best Actress Oscar nominations.  Some people think Witherspoon could even win Best Actress for her performance in Wild (though most people are betting on Julianne Moore for a win).  I’d say Witherspoon’s decision to focus on producing films with strong roles for women is definitely working out for her.

Based on Wild’s theatrical trailer, I wasn’t too excited to see the movie.  The preview just kind of left me cold.  (I’ve heard a lot of people compare this film to Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, but to me, that story was much more compelling.  And the ending was heart-breaking, moving, and kind of profound.  To me, Wild just looked like another one of those “woman wandering around finding herself” movies.  I’m sometimes very annoyed when I peruse women’s fiction and keep coming across the push for, “If you’re unhappy with your life, try focusing totally on yourself for an extended period of time.  Use all of your financial and emotional resources doing something extremely pointless entirely just for you.”  As a woman, I resent the insinuation that my life would be more meaningful if I took a year off to scour the world for the perfect pair of shoes, finding love along the way.  I want to scream, “Wouldn’t it be okay for us to find happiness by doing something meaningful instead?  Couldn’t we like build a career or raise a family or donate time to a charity or create art?  Do we have to just wander around taking cooking classes in exotic locations?”  Why are so many stories about women finding themselves so focused on self-indulgence, spending money, and blowing off all significant relationships?)  (For the record, I love travel, and I’m not against self-exploration, but I find this entire subgenre of fiction so grating.  I just can’t help it.)

Anyway, now that I’ve gone off on that (perhaps somewhat biased and possibly the tiniest bit emotionally charged) tangent, I should probably say that Wild is a much better film than the preview led me to believe.  The biggest factor in its favor is that it’s completely entertaining and engrossing.  After seeing the film (though without having read her memoir) I could easily come up with a number of criticisms of author Cheryl Strayed, but I’ll say this for her, she knows how to tell a story.

I mean, Wild is not a retelling of some event of profound historical significance.  It’s just about an ordinary woman who has difficulty coping with the loss of her mother and goes on a long hike up the Pacific coast to try to reset her life.  Nothing particularly shocking or significant happens on this hike.  Most of Cheryl’s journey is interior, a reflection on events that have already happened and their effect on her.  Still, right from the start the movie gets our attention and manages to hold it.  As is often the case with fiction, the telling of the thing is far more important than what’s being told.

The other thing that makes this movie something special is the performance of Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother.  What a fantastic character, and Dern makes her so sympathetic, so sweetly screwed up, so damaged, so vulnerable, so resilient, so compassionate, so optimistic, so tragic.  (Seriously, by the middle of the movie, I had practically fallen in love with Cheryl’s mother.)  I hope Laura Dern pulls off a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination (though it’s a very competitive year for Supporting Actress).  Right now, it seems like there’s room for her.  SAG-AFTRA went for Naomi Watts, and the Globes picked Jessica Chastain, so I feel like the discrepancy leaves some wiggle room in that fifth slot.  (Of course, there are arguably five to ten other actresses who deserve it just as much as Dern, including Chastain (and maybe even Watts).)  So who knows what will happen.

The Good:
I’m not sure who deserves the lion’s share of credit for this—probably either director Jean-Marc Vallée or screenwriter Nick Hornby—but Wild has a fantastic sense of storytelling evident from its earliest scenes.

I saw the film in a packed house (very unusual for the theater I was attending, though more often seen during awards season).  I’m sure that the recent SAG and Globe nominations helped draw a crowd on opening day, but for whatever reason, the audience turned up.  Although aside from me and maybe a handful of others, most patrons were over fifty, there was a pretty even mix of men and women, and almost everyone responded to the film with very vocal pleasure.

In the early scenes, so much of the story is told non-verbally.  First we get an intriguing, palpably raw glimpse of Cheryl’s hike in medias res.  Then we jump back in time to discover how Cheryl got to this point.  The (rather telling) comic business of the backpack drew tremendous response from the audience (sporadic giggles, knowing groans, scattered whispers).

The point is, what is actually happening on the screen is very interesting.  It holds our attention because Witherspoon goes through such a meticulous ritual of eye-catching actions.  Not only do her early struggles with her backpack help us orient ourselves and prepare us to comprehend the action the story we’re about to see, but they also make us aware of what’s going on thematically and what’s at stake in this journey for Strayed.

As the story opens, Cheryl Strayed is a woman who has a lot of baggage—in every possible sense.  She’s also very human, winningly ordinary.  When she’s frustrated, she curses almost comically.  When she’s at the end of her rope, we understand (even though we don’t know exactly what’s brought her to that point).  Because of the strength of these compelling early scenes, the audience quickly bonds with Cheryl and develops and interest in what she’s doing.

And, of course, it helps that she’s always doing something.  Action is always more interesting to watch than stasis, particularly when it’s accompanied by dialogue.  (Cheryl talks to herself, hears voices of her past, and often loses herself in memories that we experience as flashbacks.)

So the movie benefits from the fact that Cheryl is always either doing or saying something that people want to watch.  Once the movie is over, no doubt some audience members will find more of value to reflect on than others, but while the events of the story are still happening, everyone is paying attention.

As I’ve mentioned, stories about people trying to find themselves sometimes get on my nerves.  But Wild is actually not too bad in this regard because Cheryl genuinely has lost herself.  She’s not just bored with her job or feeling vaguely unfulfilled romantically.  After her mother dies, she grows distant from her husband, starts having sex with random strangers on a regular basis, and even spends a short period shooting up heroin.  So her plan to get her life back on track by taking some time out from her real life to clear her head and rediscover the person she is actually makes sense.  She’s not trying to transform her core identity so much as reclaim it.  Her life has basically gone off the rails, and she’s desperate to get some clarity and push the reset button.

Taking a long hike on a clearly marked trail is actually a fairly healthy way to deal with grief.  (Certainly it’s a much safer outlet for nervous energy than narcotics and unfulfilling, anonymous sex.  I think it’s good that we get to see some of Cheryl’s sexual encounters because they don’t look particularly appealing.  I mean, having a string of affairs doesn’t sound like the worst thing on earth.  Embracing your sensuality can sometimes bring happiness and release.  But getting passed back and forth between two restaurant patrons while still in your waitress uniform in the dirty back alley behind the restaurant as you hallucinate the disapproving ghost of your mother…?  Clearly Cheryl is not happy.)

Best Scene Visually:
Despite the beauty of the Pacific coast, the movie is not all that stunning visually.  As I said earlier, we do get a lot of visual storytelling, but this is not a movie about breathtaking views or exquisitely framed shots.  Several key moments are conveyed entirely through visuals (the recurring flashback of young Cheryl going to the drug store for her mother) or entirely through visuals until we eventually get a narrative explanation.  We don’t have to be told what’s going on as Cheryl is off hiking.  The movie shows us again and again and again.

I suppose visually I particularly like the scene when Cheryl meets up with some young male hikers in the rain.  The falling rain stirs up a traumatic memory that makes a strong impression.

Best Action Sequence:
I love the moment when the tank is empty.  The use of foreshadowing there is brilliant (again, one of the things I love so much about the film, it’s careful, deliberate story-building).  Her panic and delirium is quite captivating, and her solution to her problem is very interesting.  What happens after that is weird and disturbing, and memorable (if a little vague).

Best Scene:
Laura Dern’s character is my favorite in the movie, and all her scenes with Witherspoon are great, but I actually thought one of the nicest moments in the film was the heart-to-heart Cheryl has with her brother in bed.  In most of her memories, Cheryl behaves badly or inconsiderately, but here, we see a moment that actually makes her look like a pretty great sister and daughter, which is nice for a change.

Best Scene/Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Laura Dern:
Laura Dern is the best thing about this movie.  I’m not even a particular fan (though I certainly have nothing against Dern), but she’s just magnificent in this role, bringing an endearing fragility to Cheryl’s mother that makes Bobbi nearly impossible not to love.

The beautiful spirit of the mother certainly makes the intense extremity of Cheryl’s grief a bit easier to understand.  What a beautiful woman, someone who manages to find the beauty in a very harsh, punishing life!  And clearly despite her weaknesses, Bobbi with all her positivity and love managed to protect Cheryl from having an even more traumatic childhood than she did.

Dern and Witherspoon have a lovely scene in the kitchen together (when Dern is singing and making dinner and Witherspoon takes exception to her happiness).  I love the melancholy of this character, the sense that she’s always a little bit miserable and wounded, and yet she persists in embracing what is beautiful and good in life.  Her line about the horse, and her “I was never me” speech in the car are also fantastic.

Dern does a lot through body language and posture.  She exudes the energy of this woman, and I hope she does get an Oscar nomination somehow.

Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Reese Witherspoon:
Witherspoon’s most Oscary scene surely comes when she listens to a little boy sing her a song near the end of the film, but the very first scene of the movie when she fights with her boots and struggles with her toenails is very well performed, too.

Dern’s character may be the soul of the film, but Witherspoon’s performance is the backbone.  She has a huge part and basically carries the movie.  Without a strong lead performance, Wild would completely fall apart.

This is the best part Witherspoon has had in a long time, and this is certainly one of her strongest ever performances.  (So much of that has to do with the ability to work with good material.)  Based on Wild, Witherspoon should definitely keep producing her own projects.  I like her better here than I did in Walk the Line, and I suppose she could win a second Oscar.  As I mentioned in my review of The Theory of Everything, I didn’t particularly connect with Felicity Jones’s performance.  I actually think Supporting Actress has much stronger performances than Actress this year, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see everything yet.  So we’ll see.

The Negatives:
The trail ends and so does the movie.  Bam.  Just like that.  Cheryl Strayed’s journey is far from over, of course.  She’s managed to clear her head and confront some demons, but she still has to get reacclimated to civilization and do the work to make her life better and more satisfying.

Part of the problem with the film is that every major thing that is going to happen in this story has already happened before the movie starts.  Cheryl’s central preoccupation is the trauma of her mother’s death—which stirred up the unrest of a fairly traumatic childhood.  She goes hiking to find the time and space to sort all of that out, but nothing too eventful actually happens on the hike.  In the end, we’re not waiting for some big inevitable thing to happen (which is fortunate because nothing does), but that does leave this kind of amorphous, anticlimactic sensation lingering in the final scenes of the movie.

You think, “Hmm.  This has been entertaining, but so what?”  For Cheryl, the hike is a focused journey of personal growth through physical hardship that ends in a life-changing moment of clarity, but for those of us in the audience, it’s just some woman walking along until the trail ends and she stops.  I don’t know how you could fix that without adding some annoyingly contrived fictionalized shape to the hike itself, though.

Another slight drawback of the movie is that Cheryl herself is not always a very sympathetic character.  About eighty-five percent of her memories involve occasions when she was unkind to her mother.  Now clearly this is because she misses her late mother and regrets all the times she didn’t appreciate her as much as she should have.  Nevertheless, it has the practical effect of making Bobbi look like an angel and Cheryl come across as a spoiled bitch.  (Now mind you, I’m not trying to insult Cheryl Strayed.  I’ve written a memoir myself—but mine isn’t as exciting because there’s very little hiking and much less heroin—so I fully appreciate how difficult it is to write honestly about yourself.  And I have no doubt that Cheryl comes across so badly in her memories precisely because they are her own memories, and she is being extremely hard on herself.)  (Of course, I found her annoying in other ways, too.  The way she appropriates profound quotations from great authors and then adds “and Cheryl Strayed” to the attribution is a bit irritating.  Still, I mean, who hasn’t written down favorite quotes in a journal or diary?  I can never decide if in person Strayed would be horribly annoying or like the coolest person ever.  At any rate, despite how irritating she sometimes seems as a character within her story, I found her story itself surprisingly compelling, and since she is the one who wrote it, surely she should get some credit for that.)

One other minor thing—I did not understand Gabby Hoffmann’s character, Aimee.  Who is Aimee?  (I mean, literally.  Who is she?  What is her relationship with Cheryl?  I feel like I must have missed some expository dialogue.  Maybe I didn’t hear part of one of their conversations because of crowd noise?  Initially, she seemed like a close relative.  Cheryl doesn’t have a sister, but maybe she’s a cousin?  Maybe a close friend?  But then she gets so bossy.  She acts like she’s in charge of Cheryl and responsible for her.  Is she a counselor or a parole officer or something?  I’m really not sure.  If she’s just a friend, she’s awfully devoted (and domineering).  For a split second, I thought she and Cheryl might be dating, but then I would expect the movie to make that very clear since it would be a major departure for the character (recently divorced and apparently sleeping with every man she encounters).  Finally I decided that Aimee must be some kind of counselor or court appointed…what?  She behaves like someone appointed by the state to check up on you to make sure you don’t slip back into bad behaviors.  Actually, I don’t know who she is or why she’s even in the movie (if we’re not going to learn more about her).  It’s not like this ruined the movie for me or anything, though.

Overall:
Wild is a better, more entertaining movie than I expected it to be.  So far I’ve seen just two films directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, and I’ve liked them both enough to be curious about his future projects.  Reese Witherspoon seems to have a bright future ahead of her as a producer, too, and—unless something wildly unexpected happens—an Oscar nomination for her work in this film.  For me, the highlight of Wild was Laura Dern’s superb supporting performance as Cheryl Strayed’s captivating mother, Bobbi.  The film is worth seeing for the pleasure of watching that character alone.