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Wild
is a surprising cinematic experience. Moviemakers’ newly-established fondness
for stripping their protagonists of everything contemporary as they battle the
elements of the natural world – the Australian outback in John Curran’s Tracks, the Alaskan wilderness in Sean
Penn’s Into the Wild, a remote Utah
canyon in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours –
seriously considers the chances of their subject’s survival and the harshness
of their quests. But Wild, adapted
from Cheryl Strayed’s memoir by author Nick Hornby (About a Boy) and directed by the fast-rising Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club), is rooted in the
mental journey. If the motivations of characters in those aforementioned films
were left fairly ambiguous, Hornby and Vallée opt to explicitly detail what
exactly drives Cheryl (played by Reese Witherspoon) to trek for hundreds upon hundreds of miles.
Vallée
opens with a grueling teaser: seated on a (very) high plateau, a clearly
exhausted Cheryl pulls off her boot and groans at the sight of a bloody foot
and a disintegrating nail. She peels it off, and subsequently yelps – in the
process, she accidentally nudges her boot, and, horrified, watches it tumble
down the mountain. There’s an immediate if familiar communication of imminent
danger, of “what is she doing?” that’s come to be recognizable in a
slate of similarly-themed films. In retrospect, the teaser is a weird choice; Wild deliberately glosses over the life-threatening
elements Cheryl encounters while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT), and
similarly avoids fetishizing the landscape’s breathtaking splendor. What’s
translated is less an introspective examination of the cross-state hike – of
its danger, of her unrelenting desire to push on – than a layered identification
of what got her there. It’s the inverse approach of Tracks or Into the Wild,
which only hint at the predicaments of their protagonists before delving into
the journey itself.
So,
yes: Cheryl has decided to hike the entire PCT by herself, ridiculously-huge
pack in tow and motivation firmly established. It’s an effort to quell her
four-year downward spiral, which began after the cancer-caused death of the “love
of her life,” or her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern); she began sleeping around (a
lot) and taking (a lot of) drugs, and in the process lost a baby, her marriage and
– most crucially – her connection to her mother. She sets out alone, hikes,
encounters strangers both friendly and creepy, eventually conjures up innovative
ways to eat and drink – but again, those are just details. Completely alone in
boundless nature, she is left only with her thoughts and her memories – a sort
of confrontation with everything that her spiral was intended to repress.
Vallée,
across diverse albeit well-executed efforts in The Young Victoria, Dallas
Buyers Club and now Wild, lacks an
authorial stamp; he seems to be in service to the material, rather than its
conformer. This is not an inherently bad thing. He demonstrates a relaxed
easiness with his actors, finding performances within them that maintain authenticity
even as they go to unexpected places – as a most extreme example, Matthew
McConaughey and Jared Leto both won Oscars just last year for Dallas for moving way beyond our
perceptions of them – and he’s also, in the best sense of the word, extremely
competent. Hornby’s script fashioned a story dominated by flashbacks, and Vallée
conveys this exceptionally well: for a long stretch of time (the best, actually),
the film’s narrative is dominated by images, past, present and future, that are
stitched together with striking confidence and intelligence. His (excellent)
soundtrack fades in and out perfectly, an accurate indicator of the way music
sporadically pops into our minds after the recollection of an abstractly-related
memory – or as a mere way to fill the time. Wild
bristles along, communicating exactly what it intends to.
You
also get – likely due to the source material’s heavy involvement – an excellent
sense of Cheryl, who in the film is deeply flawed yet well-rounded as a person
contending with enormous loss. The lavish praise surrounding Witherspoon’s work
here actually does the actress a great disservice. Watching her sturdy,
astutely-measured performance, there was nothing that surprised me or was beyond what I thought her capable of. Contrarily, Witherspoon is an
accomplished actress with a breadth of excellent performances, both comedic and
dramatic, on her resume. She fits into Vallée’s template nicely, and doesn’t
ring a false note – if anything, it’s a necessary change of pace that hopefully
implies she’ll be looking to challenging and thoughtful roles more often. Small
as her role is, it’s actually Dern that makes the lasting impression – her
ghostly presence haunts Cheryl’s journey, but as she reflects, Dern puts
forward the “great” woman Cheryl remembers, warm and loving and striving. It’s
an expression of unbridled empathy and goodness, the kind that a performer who
can’t go bottom-deep (as Dern can, and does) would render agonizingly sincere. In
general, Vallée’s actor-friendly approach allows many bit players to shine,
especially Justified alums W. Earl
Brown and Kevin Rankin as friendly travelers.
Wild
is competent and well-executed, but it’s also muted and excessively detached. As
mentioned, Cheryl’s expedition is marked by mental processes and not her
physically arduous undertaking. Her past – her motivation – is pieced together
slowly, and well-handled as that may be, a pointlessness seeps in. As the
opening teaser indicated, danger is afoot. She has decided to throw her life
into the hands of the nature gods – may what happens happen – as a way to concretely
come to terms with the past, to cleanse in order to move forward. Ultimately,
it’s a mild conceit. Vallée seems content to stir emotion exclusively in
flashback sequences, but there’s a serious, unintended side effect: her actual
hike and what she actually faces is eventually rendered airless. Consequentially,
Witherspoon is handed a richly-detailed character that is nonetheless lacking.
In Tracks, Mia Wasikowska’s Robyn
Davidson is an utter enigma – and yet, as her trek wears on, she brilliantly
conveys a sense of isolation and of loner-dom. There’s a deep emotional
involvement that creeps to the surface as she finds herself mentally and
physically exhausted – the “cleanse” in this version is quite cathartic. In Wild, what Cheryl faces in the physical
realm is secondary; that idea may be admirably different, but it projects a
distance that disallows proper connection to the viewer. The hundreds of miles
she walks were undeniably draining – indeed, she says as much when asked about
it – but Witherspoon carries on with only occasional deep breaths, as the
primary challenge is rooted in her character’s mind. Thus, there’s not enough
investment in anything: what’s translated to screen is a linear redemptive tale
that fails to delve into the disturbing psychological underpinnings of Cheryl’s
past and of her decision to actually go “wild.”
That,
in a nutshell, is what makes Wild so unique and yet so frustrating. I’m certainly not one that demands emotional
intensity or the kind of devastation that themes Into the Wild – but there’s a mellowness in Vallée’s style that neither
moves nor probes. There’s something to be said for Cheryl’s empowerment and
strength, in completing an inherently-masculinized activity. But that seems to
be such an overriding argument in Wild,
compensatory for what’s otherwise lacking. Hornby and Vallée ignore the outside
elements, allowing nature’s beauty to just rest and its danger to exist in the
peripheral. They keep Cheryl present, detailed and whole – but she’s too far
away. We can’t quite grab her, can’t quite feel her – only when Witherspoon and
Dern are together, or when Cheryl is mourning, do we really connect to the character
and her cinematic treatment. Wild is
always a smart movie, but for such a breathtaking and inspiring story, it’s a curiously
resigned one as well.