The Witherspoon Revival Breaks New Ground in WILD

Reese Witherspoon’s career pivot bounds forward with Wild, a modern slice of Henry David Thoreau by way of Oprah’s Book Club. In the debut feature from Pacific Films, Witherspoon’s new production company, she plays Cheryl Straying, a former drug addict who turned her thousand-mile hike across the Pacific Crest Trail into a best-selling memoir about self-destruction and self-discovery. The film’s subject matter — and its title — immediately bring to mind Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, another real-life story about a lone wanderer braving the isolation and dangers of life off the beaten track, but Wild, adapted by Nick Horny from Straying’s book, aligns more closely with Walden, Thoreau’s classic guide to transcendentalism and cabin-building in the American wilderness.

Penn’s film was about Christopher McCandless’ flight from civilisation into the radical and selfish asceticism of hunting and gathering, while Thoreau prioritised life on its margins, a happy medium where one could enjoy the terrible, transcendent beauty of nature but still pick up the mail. Over a punishing three months, Wild‘s Straying endures desert heat, mountain snow and toenail infections as a kind of brutal physical therapy, exorcising her shame, sadness and deep, deep grief over the death of her mother (Laura Dern). It’s a recklessly random exercise for the novice backpacker, and her plucky nativity gets her into some tragi-comic bother, but this is a lighter and more character-focused version of the survivalist drama (all limbs remain intact). Straying sees in nature a way to ‘live deliberately’, as Thoreau put it, if only for the duration of the trail; a secular pilgrimage to gain clarity and closure before resuming the necessary responsibilities of real life.

Hornby’s screenplay interrupts Straying’s travelling with flashbacks, outlining the emotional crises that compel her onward. She lives and goes to school with her mother, who falls ill and is given twelve months to live. She dies in one. Sucker-punched by grief, and alienated from her brother and husband (Thomas Sadoski), she deadens herself with drugs and promiscuity. Hornby and director Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club) do their best to fold in multiple narratives, with memories bleeding into Straying’s daydreams and hallucinations, even if it is sometimes an awkward fit. The redemption narrative screams calculated awards-bait, but the script and performances push naturalism over melodrama. Dern’s tremendous maternal presence is key, projecting a clumsy, effervescent kind of loving optimism. It’s another reminder of Dern’s next-level abilities and the continually overlooked excellence of HBO’s Enlightened.

Straying’s journey is sometimes meandering and episodic to the point of being undramatic, but her encounters along the way are tinted with enough curiosity or menace. The focus is on internal drama, with Hornby layering in voiceovers and diary entries with the flashbacks, but the film never really gets over the problem of externalizing Straying’s arc and communicating her progression. Indeed, the film’s principal pleasure is simply in accompanying its pilgrim along the way. Witherspoon’s recent small roles in films like Mud and Devil’s Knot signal a performer reaching for something more demanding than the love-triangle blonde and in Straying, she has a fully-realised and massively watchable heroine, her sweetness tempered with a wry, vulnerable strength and pitched with ease. Wild more charming than moving, but, to be honest, it’s surprising how good it is.

x-posted at Belfast Film Blog