Deftly adapted by screenwriter Nick Hornby from Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, this grittily likable journey of self-discovery finds Reese Witherspoon walking more than a thousand miles in someone else’s shoes to “become the woman my mother thought I was”. As Cheryl makes her blistered and bloodied progress along the PCT, from the Mojave desert through California and Oregon to the borders of Washington State, we flash back to happier times with her mom (Laura Dern) and traumatic encounters with love, death, rough sex and dangerous drugs, gradually building a kaleidoscopic picture of her life, different periods overlapping like waves on a beach. At times, Jean-Marc Vallée’s direction drifts towards the hallucinatory, a half-remembered dream of an exhausted life. Elsewhere, it’s down and dirty, offering a rewardingly unprettified account of our antiheroine’s tribulations past and present. Be assured, this is no Eat Pray Love exercise in babblingly scenic psycho-tourism; the sight of Witherspoon lifting an infected toenail in the opening scenes is reassuringly wince-inducing.
Lacking the tragi-romantic hyperbole of Into the Wild (both novel and film), this is closer in tone to John Curran’s adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, which has grown in my estimation since I first reviewed it last year. Witherspoon is admirably fearless in her depiction of Cheryl, evidently empowered by the establishment of her Pacific Standard film production company to produce her finest work since Walk the Line. Under the watchful eye of Vallée (who drew Oscar-winning performances from Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club), she breathes raw life into a character whose travails could so easily have descended into self-indulgence. Top marks, too, to the sound designers, who interweave fragmentary pop classics (Simon and Garfunkel strike a defining note) with lonely singalongs and atmospheric ambient noise to take us deep inside the head of our spiritual guide. While the external scenery is spectacular, it’s the internal landscapes that capture and hold our attention.
