BackFilm Review: Wild
A woman's laborious road to nirvana
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British screenwriter and novelist Nick Hornby adapts Cheryl Strayed’s best-seller of the same name for Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild. Not having read the book can be an advantage sometimes. But the film version of this purgative journey of a woman through more than 1,000 miles of gorgeous and frightening wilderness proved slightly tedious. I couldn’t care if the book is better; the protagonist does not quite have that hook.
The canvas is sparse—thorny, snowy, wet forests and an American town filmed in low light, mirroring the protagonist’s dark state of mind. But even with the minimalist visual template, the film says a lot, painfully and eagerly. Vallée is at pains to convey the sublime, to reiterate the character’s spiritual quest through this gruelling journey. Wild is not splendid, uplifting poetry or easy catharsis, but an over-expressive and busy cinematic journal.
Cheryl, played with minimum fuss by Reese Witherspoon, loses her mother (Laura Dern) to cancer. Extreme grief makes her self-destructive. Her marriage ends; she sleeps with a lot of men and plunges into heroin addiction with one of them. To become “the woman her mother raised her to be", Cheryl decides to embark on a solo hiking trip that begins in California and ends on the Oregon-Washington border. Despite or because of an abusive and alcoholic father, Cheryl, her younger brother and mother shared a strong and tender bond, and this is the film’s convincing emotional axis. The loss of her mother damages an intelligent, well-read woman—a believable premise.
Cheryl’s solution to expunge sadness and self-disgust is an arduous one, and the film details it wonderfully. Furry insects crawling under a shaky torchlight, the ponderous carrying of a huge backpack by the diminutive, thin-legged Cheryl, her encounters with men and her trepidation at befriending them—it’s all there. But the character’s laboured and verbose ruminations, facilitated by a voice-over, dilutes her pluck. Ultimately, the sympathy for her wanes; and you wait for the journey to end, and for her to reach “the bridge of god".
Witherspoon, nominated in the category of Actress in a Leading Role for the forthcoming Academy Awards, delivers a bare-bones performance. She is fittingly the plain all-American girl—overwrought by her own grief and frenetically looking for a balm.
Wild released in theatres on Friday.
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