Movie review: Wild

Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film Wild. Photo / AP

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
Running Time: 119 mins
Rating: R16 (Sex scenes, nudity, drug use, language)

Verdict: Raw journey of self-discovery hinges on strong performance.

Fed up with a lack of stimulating female leads in Hollywood, Reese Witherspoon formed a production company and started making her own work. She's created herself a doozy (and a deserved Oscar nomination) playing Cheryl Strayed in Wild.

The film is an adaptation of Strayed's best-selling memoir of the same name, which chronicles the author's soul-searching trek of 1800km from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border. Though the physical challenge is daunting, especially for an inexperienced hiker with too-small boots and an overstuffed backpack, Wild isn't a story of man-against-nature triumph. Self-destruction is more likely to scuttle Cheryl than a rattlesnake.

When she sets off on the trail Cheryl is unmoored, devastated by the death of her mother and mourning her crumbled marriage - the fallout of her sleeping around and heroin use. The hike is her conscious effort to heal herself. "I'm going to walk myself back to the person my mother thought I was," declares Cheryl. Yes, Wild teeters towards the self-help aisle with inspirational handwritten quotes and earnest voiceover, but the material resonates because of its authentic roots and the benefit of expert treatment from screenplay writer Nick Hornby (About a Boy) and director Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club).

The backstory is painted lightly with flashbacks and montages and particularly good use of the soundtrack with snippets of songs used to trigger memories, as they so often do.

Witherspoon shows versatility playing Cheryl at different stages in her life as a bookish, self-righteous college student and grieving sexed-up mess-up as well as determined-yet-clueless hiker. Despite the capacity in the subject matter for histrionics, Witherspoon's performance is masterfully low-key. Her scenes with her mother Bobbi, played with relentless positivity by Laura Dern, are especially affecting.

Overall, Hornby serves Strayed's material well, and the many fans of the book won't be let down by this necessarily streamlined version of events, but some scenes - notably one involving a horse - do lose impact in translation to the screen.

The film's advantage is the ability to show the arresting landscapes from desert to snow to lush forest, shot in natural light by cinematographer Yves Belanger. And yet the natural wilderness never overawes. Wild remains primarily an internal journey. A real story about a real woman that is vibrant and messy and touching and - dare I say it - inspiring, so that even when Cheryl's solitary penance comes to its end you want to keep on trudging alongside her.

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