Wild
It’s hard for anyone to understand what it’s like to truly lose yourself until they hit the very recesses of their own soul. The proverbial “rock bottom” is different for everyone, but the feeling is still the same: alienation from your own personality. A profound sense that somewhere, along the way, something that made us who we are was lost, and needs to be rediscovered. How we do that will define us moving forward.
For Cheryl Strayed, the protagonist of “Wild,” that moment comes after a downward spiral of addiction to sex, drugs, alcohol, and infidelity after her mother dies suddenly from cancer. That is the catalyst for her journey downward; when her husband finds her one day, lying naked after a night of passionless sex and heroin, that is her “rock bottom.” They get a divorce, she goes into therapy, but something more is needed for her to find herself again. She decides to walk the Pacific Coast Trail, a 2600-mile trek from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. She’s not a hiker, though, and believe me, something like this is not to be taken lightly. She is thoroughly unprepared for this, but she has to because, well, she thinks it will help her get in touch with the woman her mother (played by Laura Dern in some crucial, powerful scenes) raised her to be. This is an act of reckless abandon; who she is, and what she’ll do, when she finishes this quest, not even she knows. She just knows she has to do it.
Cheryl Strayed is a real person, who really did this, and it’s her memoir, adapted by “About a Boy’s” Nick Hornby, that is the basis for “Wild,” the second fearless biopic in as many years from Jean-Marc Vallee after last year’s “Dallas Buyers Club,” and while it’s not as riveting in it’s authenticity as that film was, it’s a riveting journey of self-discovery nonetheless. Hornby and Vallee don’t tell Cheryl’s story in a straight line, but rather, parcel out the key moments of her life before this trek, allowing us, little by little, into Cheryl’s world, and allowing us to empathize even more as her journey unfolds. And as Cheryl, Reese Witherspoon gives a great emotional and physical performance that bares all (sometimes literally) and doesn’t pull punches with regards to Cheryl’s life and personality. She isn’t always an easy person to love, but Witherspoon’s performance (her best in a long time) definitely is. She makes “Wild” a journey worth taking.
