movie review of wild

“Wild” begins with novice hiker Cheryl Strayed at one of the lowest points during her three-month, 1,100-mile-long solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. She gingerly inspects her bloodied feet and prepares to pluck a battered nail from her big toe. While yanking it, she emits a primal scream of agony and causes one of her boots to tumble over a steep cliff. In frustration, she tosses its partner down the incline as well, and shrieks some colorful expletives for good measure.

We should rightfully be filled with concern for this traveler, all alone in the wilderness and sans appropriate footwear. Yet I knew she would be all right. Why? Because Reese Witherspoon , an actress with enough high-octane spunk to fuel an entire cheerleading squad as well as the football team, is playing her.

Witherspoon has always been adept at embodying extreme personalities who somehow manage to overcome whatever barriers are placed in their way. Whether it is the underestimated smarts of Elle Woods in “ Legally Blonde ” or the unstoppable ambition of Tracy Flick in “ Election ,” she is an expert at personifying perky pillars of strength who are just a wee bit scary. 

She is also a survivor, and not just on screen. Her career took a fall that rivaled Strayed’s wayward boot after she won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as country legend June Carter Cash in 2005’s “Walk the Line.” How she ended up in the likes of “Four Christmases” (which actually managed to collect a domestic gross of $120 million) and “How Do You Know” (an out-and-out gobbler courtesy of once-great James L. Brooks) is anyone’s guess. Mine would be that male-dominated mainstream Hollywood rarely feels the need to showcase women over 30 as the centerpiece of a movie, Academy Award or not.

But Witherspoon recently took matters into her own hands by procuring film projects for herself. She went after the rights to “ Gone Girl ” with gusto. Unfortunately, she ended up with only a producer credit instead of also starring after director David Fincher nixed the idea and went with Rosamund Pike instead. Me, I would have loved to have seen her variation on the schemer known as Amazing Amy.

But there was no way she was letting go of the lead role in “Wild,” based on Strayed’s 2012 best-selling memoir that recalls other self-induced trials of endurance such as “ Eat Pray Love ,” “ 127 Hours ” and “Into the Wild.”  And while Witherspoon summons all her skills and then some to portray this lost soul on the path to recovery, I just could not completely buy her in this part.

She is fine, however, when comically lugging an unwieldy backpack and steadfastly sticking to her walking tour that begins in the Mojave Desert and ends at the Cascades. There are plenty of encounters, both welcome and unwelcome, along the way, including a rattlesnake, a curious fox, predatory men and surprisingly kind strangers. She sweats, swears, shivers and mutters her way through scorching heat and unseasonable snow, copes with dehydration and gobbles freeze-dried meals, all the while building up quite a stench in between rest stops.

OK, I don’t believe Witherspoon would ever reek so horribly. Southern gals like her glow, don’t you know. Yet she is still youthful enough at 38, looking as if she is ready for high-school gym class in her hiking shorts and T-shirt, that she easily pulls off portraying a 26-year-old. In fact, she hasn’t been so unguarded and emotionally open onscreen since her captivating film debut as a young teen in love in 1991’s “The Man in the Moon.” Just as director Jean-Marc Vallee brought out the best in Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in last year’s “Dallas Buyers Club,” he mostly does right by Witherspoon.

As for life-threatening hazards, they mainly exist in her head as flickers of old memories grow into full-blown flashback sequences. I was less convinced by these visits to the past where we see Strayed lose her bearings after her adored mother dies from a virulent bout of cancer at 45. ( Laura Dern , only nine years older than Witherspoon, manages to be quite fabulous as Bobbi, a human sunbeam who radiates unconditional love for her children after leaving behind an abusive marriage.)

Overwhelmed by grief, Strayed engages in reckless sex with strangers and picks up a heroin addiction while destroying her marriage to a rather sweet and caring husband. Witherspoon tries, even doing her first-ever nude scenes, to convince us she has hit the skids. Yet no matter how greasy her hair or how dead her eyes, I just can’t buy her as a self-destructive junkie.

Thankfully, “Wild” only suffers somewhat from this disconnect. It is engaging enough to follow Strayed on her journey, one that she dedicates to Bobbi. Her mission statement: “I’m going to walk myself back to the woman my mother thought I was.” I enjoyed her literary-inspired scribbles left behind at various signposts, starting with this quotation from Emily Dickinson: “If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve.” Some of the soundtrack tunes are obvious—particularly Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa” and “Homeward Bound”—but they are leavened with snippets of Lucinda Williams, Portishead and even some highly appropriate Grateful Dead. 

Ultimately, I decided to forgive most of the hints of miscasting after being brought to tears by an unexpectedly beautiful moment provided by a young boy strolling the trail with his grandmother as he serenades Strayed with a heartbreaking rendition of “Red River Valley.” Even when “Wild” occasionally stumbles, it gets back on track with relative ease.

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

• Laura Dern as Bobbi
• Gaby Hoffmann as Aimee
• Kevin Rankin as Greg
• Brian Van Holt as Ranger
• Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed
• Thomas Sadoski as Paul
• Charles Baker as TJ
• W. Earl Brown as Frank
• J.D. Evermore as Clint

Original Story

• Cheryl Strayed
• Jean-Marc Vallée
• Nick Hornby

Cinematography

• Yves Bélanger

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Movie Review

Walking With Solitude, and Her Baggage

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Wild’

Jean-marc vallée narrates a sequence from “wild” with reese witherspoon..

By A.O. Scott

• Dec. 2, 2014

“Wild” is the story of a very long walk, a trek of over 1,000 miles along the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, from the Southern California desert to the lush forests of Oregon. Based on Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir , the film begins, like the book, in the middle of the journey, with a scene that at once celebrates the sublimity of nature and the spirit of solitude and douses such romanticism in a demystifying spray of cold water.

Cheryl, played by Reese Witherspoon with grit, wit and unblinking honesty, reaches the top of a rocky outcropping with a panoramic view of surrounding mountains. Her panting, sweaty, irritated presence contrasts with the tranquil glory of the landscape, her contemplation of which is interrupted by the loss of a toenail and then of a hiking boot. That mishap elicits a keening howl of frustration and a perfectly self-defeating gesture of protest as she hurls the other boot away.

Movie Review: ‘Wild’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “wild.”.

In due course, we will come to know a lot more about Cheryl — about her childhood and her sex life, about the death of her mother and the end of her marriage — but we start out with the crucial information that this is not a woman who makes things easy, for herself or anyone else. The story “Wild” has to tell is partly about how Cheryl deals with hardship, and about how, following a piece of long-ago maternal advice, she learns to put herself “in the way of beauty.” But it is also about her appetite for difficulty and her insistence on confronting ugliness, inside and out.

Ms. Strayed’s book, written in a frank, funny voice that only occasionally drifts into clouds of self-help abstraction, is a complicated blend of grief memoir and travelogue. It tries very hard not to stick to the well-marked autobiographical path, blazed by St. Augustine in his “Confessions,” from sin to salvation, even as it passes through some classically Augustinian moral territory. Before setting out on her trek, the author had been using heroin and cheating on her husband. She insists, however, that her goal is not redemption but self-acceptance, not a catalog of regrets but a clear view and welcoming embrace of experience in all its forms.

The structure of “Wild” is as complicated as its themes. The “action” on the trail — walking, thinking, pitching the tent at night and packing it up in the morning — is punctuated by looping reminiscences of the life that preceded it. What is most audacious about the film, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club”) from a screenplay by Nick Hornby (yes, that Nick Hornby ), is how closely it follows and how fully it respects Ms. Strayed’s free-associative, memory-driven narrative. In its thrilling disregard for the conventions of commercial cinematic storytelling, “Wild” reveals what some of us have long suspected: that plot is the enemy of truth, and that images and emotions can carry meaning more effectively than neatly packaged scenes or carefully scripted character arcs.

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Common Sense Media Review

Emotional tale of self-discovery explores grief, addiction.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Wild is based on Cheryl Strayed's best-selling memoir about the cathartic three and a half months she spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Starring Reese Witherspoon as Strayed, the movie is part journey of self discovery and part flashback to the good, the bad, and the ugly in…

Why Age 16+?

Cheryl's breasts are visible in sex scenes and right out of the shower as she ex

Frequent strong language: "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole, and religious exclamations (

Adults smoke, snort, and inject heroin. Characters drink (once straight from the

Domestic abuse, close-up of dead mother, two characters must shoot a sick horse,

REI, Danner boots, Clif bars, Snapple.

Any Positive Content?

Overarching messages are that people can get themselves out of spirals of self-d

Cheryl's mom, Bobbi, is idealized; she's intelligent, sensitive, and supportive.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Cheryl's breasts are visible in sex scenes and right out of the shower as she examines her hiking injuries. She has casual sex with several men (both while married and during the hiking trip).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent strong language: "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole, and religious exclamations ("Jesus Christ").

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults smoke, snort, and inject heroin. Characters drink (once straight from the bottle) in several scenes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Domestic abuse, close-up of dead mother, two characters must shoot a sick horse, a hunter creepily comes on to Cheryl and makes inappropriate sexual comments, Cheryl injures herself during the hike. Cheryl hitchhikes a lot and is frightened of a man with a gun in his glove compartment (he's ultimately harmless).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

Overarching messages are that people can get themselves out of spirals of self-destruction, that it's important to ask for and accept help when you need it, and that trips can be transformative catalysts for self discovery and change.

Positive Role Models

Cheryl's mom, Bobbi, is idealized; she's intelligent, sensitive, and supportive. She encourages Cheryl to be the best she can be and to find beauty and happiness in life's simple pleasures. Even though she was the victim of domestic abuse, Bobbi focuses on the positive. Cheryl spirals out of control after her mother dies, cheating on a loving husband, sleeping with men who don't care about her, and ultimately becoming a junkie. But by the end of the film, it's clear that Cheryl is ready to move forward and change.

Parents need to know that Wild is based on Cheryl Strayed's best-selling memoir about the cathartic three and a half months she spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Starring Reese Witherspoon as Strayed, the movie is part journey of self discovery and part flashback to the good, the bad, and the ugly in Strayed's past, particularly the self-destructive behavior that followed the death of her beloved mother. The mature content includes partial nudity (both sexual and matter-of-fact), several sex scenes (most of which are extramarital), explicit drug use (heroin), and strong language ("f--k," "s--t," and more). The heavy themes (domestic abuse, grief, addiction, abortion, etc.) might prove too much for many adolescents, but the movie does offer various subjects for parents to discuss with mature older teens: the importance of parent-child relationships, signs of unhealthy behavior, and the life-changing power of a monumental trip. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (9)
• Kids say (6)

Based on 9 parent reviews

A good message for teens girls with discussion

An empowering film based on the book about cheryl strayed's trek, what's the story.

Like the memoir on which it's based, WILD is a touching exploration of a woman's life-changing 1,000-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. In her mid-20s and in a state of crisis, Cheryl Strayed ( Reese Witherspoon ) sees a PCT guidebook while shopping for pregnancy tests in a pharmacy. Once her divorce is final, she's off heroin, and she's aborted an unplanned pregnancy, Cheryl decides to pack an oversized backpack with newly purchased camping gear and hike 1,000 miles of the trail. Her goal? To once again become the woman that her dearly departed mother ( Laura Dern ) raised her to become, rather than the shell of a person she'd become. During her solo trek, Cheryl reflects on her past, both the good (her beautiful mother and Cheryl's faithful and long-suffering ex-husband) and the bad (her mother's death, Cheryl's string of affairs and subsequent drug abuse). Although she encounters others on and off the trail, the movie, even more than the book, focuses on Cheryl battling her demons with every labored step.

Is It Any Good?

Wild isn't a movie for anyone who hates stories of how hitting the road, climbing a mountain, or setting off for an adventure can lift the spirit and cleanse the soul. Because that's what this movie is about -- a woman with lots of emotional baggage who doesn't know a thing about serious trekking but manages to go from greenhorn to seasoned queen of the PCT. Witherspoon isn't really known as a gritty actress, so many worried that she'd be miscast as Cheryl (at least the Cheryl in flashbacks who has casual hook-ups and shoots up drugs), but it's clear she was all in for this performance, baring her body and giving every scene her best. Witherspoon humanizes a character who, on the page, can seem overwhelmingly selfish and unlikable. On screen, Witherspoon's nuanced portrayal is touching, especially when she shares scenes with Dern, who's only nine years older than Witherspoon but convincingly plays her young survivor of a mother. Dern's performance is heartbreakingly beautiful (just like in The Fault in Her Stars ). Bobbi is what makes viewers believe that Cheryl has the power to be extraordinary.

In addition to the acting, the movie benefits from gorgeous visuals of the PCT, with sweeping vistas that will make even those who avoid going outdoors understand how experiencing nature on your own can and will change you forever. Director Jean-Marc Vallee doesn't shy away from the harsh obstacles Cheryl must overcome, physically and emotionally; by the end of the movie, you still may not love her, but you can't help believing in her power to rise out of the darkness and into the light.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the popularity of stories about journeys of self-discovery. How is this one different? What does Cheryl learn on her trip?

What's Wild 's message? Why do you think Cheryl says that she doesn't regret anything she's done or that's happened to her?

Discuss Cheryl's romantic and sexual relationships; are any of them healthy? Is her promiscuity portrayed as a problem, an understandable response to grief, or an expression of her sexuality?

Does the movie make you interested in reading the book? For parents (or teens) who've already read it, discuss some of the changes and omissions from page to screen.

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 3, 2014
• On DVD or streaming : March 31, 2015
• Cast : Reese Witherspoon , Laura Dern , Gaby Hoffmann
• Director : Jean-Marc Vallee
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Fox Searchlight
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Science and Nature
• Run time : 115 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language
• Last updated : June 16, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Wild Reviews

As usual, Witherspoon is fearless, headstrong, and tireless. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 17, 2024

Witherspoon's performance is outstanding.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 13, 2022

Reese Witherspoon gives an Oscar-worthy performance in Wild, and the cinematography is beautiful, however Vallée’s tight direction prevents the film from becoming a “connect the dots” of emotion and redemption.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2022

"Wild" is truly a film that every woman should see and one they should put on a more preferred pedestal for ideals compared to the "chick flicks" that ruin women's good sense.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2022

The cinematography is great. We have here an epic journey of self discovery.

Full Review | Oct 7, 2021

Wild is an extraordinary experience, a spiritual and emotional coming of age for a mourning daughter set against nature. A perfect film from Jean-Marc Vallée and awards-worthy performance from Reese Witherspoon.

It's too bad that the movie, in its last thirty minutes, doesn't trust the audience to process what it just saw.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 2, 2021

At its core, it's actually about a woman coming to terms with her tragic past, including the death of her beloved mother, and figuring out how to forge a future for herself.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 30, 2021

Why should audiences care about her very unexceptional life?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 4, 2020

...Fine, but it all adds up to something pretty tame when looked at with any seriousness.

Full Review | Aug 11, 2020

Wild slowly but surely enters the frazzled mind of its subject in vividly moving detail.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 2, 2020

Nothing happened at all.

Full Review | May 27, 2020

It really felt like Oscar bait.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Mar 26, 2020

Dern is terrific in this all-important supporting role, but it's Witherspoon's party, and she delivers the goods.

Full Review | Jan 9, 2020

Sometimes, simplicity makes for a most evocative and emotional journey, and Vallee's Wild is successful in that regard.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 12, 2019

Thanks for pulling a movie like this together, Reese.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 2, 2019

Witherspoon is completely magnetic, and Laura Dern's all-too-brief turn as Strayed's mother is a delight.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 5, 2019

Redemption in the modern age. There's confident direction from Vallée but little to truly delve into. Watch simply for a soulful and spellbinding Witherspoon.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 31, 2019

Wild's script hands out platitudes like servers at a wedding. There's no subtlety, or curiously any peril in this bland and unbearably introspective expedition.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 4, 2019

The film version of Wild often leaves out or glosses over precisely the things that make Strayed's story so striking.

Full Review | Mar 11, 2019

Film Review: ‘Wild’

Reese Witherspoon delivers her finest performance in years in Jean-Marc Vallee's ruggedly beautiful follow-up to 'Dallas Buyers Club.'

By Justin Chang

Justin Chang

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Cheryl Strayed’s heart-rending 2012 account of her 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail presented no shortage of obstacles en route to the bigscreen, not least in the way it used the great outdoors as the backdrop for a resolutely interior journey. But director Jean-Marc Vallee , screenwriter Nick Hornby and star-producer Reese Witherspoon have met the challenge head-on with imperfect but rewarding results in “ Wild ,” a ruggedly beautiful and emotionally resonant saga of perseverance and self-discovery that represents a fine addition to the recent bumper crop of bigscreen survival stories. Resting squarely on Witherspoon’s sturdy shoulders (along with the back-crushing backpack she carts around throughout), the Fox Searchlight release should be admiringly received by critics and arthouse audiences come Dec. 5.

Still, the film could face some competition from John Curran’s equally accomplished “Tracks” (set to open Sept. 19 Stateside), this year’s other adaptation of a bestselling woman-in-the-wilderness memoir, and it remains to be seen whether it can improve on the modest commercial performance of films like “Into the Wild,” “127 Hours” and “All Is Lost.” Of those three particular forebears (all of which also screened under appropriately scenic, high-altitude conditions at the Telluride Film Festival ), “Wild” bears the closest resemblance to Sean Penn’s 2007 drama, not only in their similar titles, but also in the way both films employ a jagged flashback structure to peel back the painful circumstances that led a young college grad in the ’90s to retreat from society and walk a very lonely road.

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Unlike “Into the Wild’s” Christopher McCandless, of course, Cheryl Strayed (born Cheryl Nyland, before she chose her wayward-sounding surname) lived to tell the tale, and she did so with no shortage of brutal honesty and hard-bitten humor — an element that finds a natural complement in Hornby’s own sharply funny instincts as a writer, making him a less counterintuitive choice here than some might expect. Indeed, the filmmakers have arguably mastered the material’s subtle, sardonic insights more so than its big emotional moments, most of which involve Strayed’s beloved mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), whose death from lung cancer at the age of 45 set off her 22-year-old daughter’s startling downward spiral into sex and heroin addiction, culminating in the end of her marriage. In condensing the book into a fleet drama that clocks in at just under two hours, Hornby has moved Bobbi’s tragic decline from the beginning of the story to the middle — a shrewd decision that nonetheless feels a bit too calculated in the execution, too neatly arranged to maximize the film’s slow-building emotional crescendo.

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Still, “Wild” is never less than involving as it follows Witherspoon’s Cheryl from the Mojave Desert, in the summer of 1995, to the Oregon-Washington border more than three months later, deftly maneuvering between her past and present sufferings along the way. The film gets some wry comic mileage out of her misguided early decision to strap on an enormous, unwieldy backpack, which is so heavy that a fellow hiker christens it “the Monster” — just one of many examples of how ill prepared Cheryl is for this particular trip, despite her tough, resilient attitude and cross-country training. Slowly she plods her way northward, dropping expletives with every step, subsisting on oatmeal that she heats on a small gas-powered stove, fending off the occasional rattlesnake, and trying to stifle the inner voice that keeps telling her, “You can quit anytime.”

But she presses defiantly onward, even when she finds herself on a dusty 20-mile walk to a water tank that turns out to be empty, or when she veers into snow-covered mountain terrain that takes an especially rough toll on her too-tight boots and cracked, bloodied toenails. (That grotesque image aside, Vallee is more inclined to linger on his Oregon landscapes, captured in awe-stirring but never self-admiring widescreen images by d.p. Yves Belanger, using handheld digital cameras with an emphasis on natural light.) Along the way, Cheryl’s agony and tedium are relieved by kind, encouraging strangers; by the meaningful quotes from Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James A. Michener that she scribbles in her journal (and which appear a bit too frequently onscreen); and by the care packages she receives every few hundred miles or so from Paul (Thomas Sadoski), the most supportive ex-husband a woman could hope for.

The painful disintegration of Cheryl’s marriage, accelerated by her frightening if not entirely convincing transformation into a heroin-shooting nymphomaniac, is presented as a direct result of Bobbi’s death, at which point “Wild” reveals itself to be, among other things, a mother-daughter love story. The film seeks to convey the full trauma of Cheryl’s loss through flashbacks to happier times, revealing Bobbi (wonderfully played by Dern) as something of a survivor herself — a woman who fled an abusive marriage and raised two kids, including Cheryl’s younger brother, Leif (Keene McRae), on her own. (Strayed’s real-life sister, Karen, has been dropped from the movie entirely.) When Bobbi is shown going back to school to earn a belated bachelor’s degree, somewhat embarrassing Cheryl by attending the same Minneapolis university, the contrast between cynical, hard-edged daughter and sunny, optimistic mother is fully felt — but so, too, is an unconditional sense of mutual devotion.

It’s no surprise that the versatile Vallee, who recently directed two Oscar-winning performances in “Dallas Buyers Club,” has elicited from Witherspoon an intensely committed turn that, in its blend of grit, vulnerability, physical bravery and emotional immediacy, represents easily her most affecting and substantial work in the nine years since “Walk the Line.” (The actress’s still-youthful appearance helps fudge her 12-year age gap with the 26-year-old Cheryl, as well as her only nine-year age gap with Dern.) Nor is it a surprise that Vallee, whose bracingly sharp editing on “Dallas Buyers Club” was one of that film’s more unsung virtues, has applied similarly bold cutting-room strategies here.

Once again working under the pseudonym of John Mac McMurphy (and sharing duties with Martin Pensa), Vallee jumps compulsively between narrative tracks; certain individual shots are sustained for just a split second, which creates a whispery, hallucinatory effect in conjunction with the film’s richly detailed soundscape. It’s here, however, that “Wild” begins to feel more constructed than fully realized, its abrupt narrative transitions relying on convenient visual parallels and memory-jogging song choices (in lieu of a score) rather than on intuitive storytelling decisions. When Cheryl is shown panting her way through a patch of dimly lit undergrowth, the sudden cutaways to her panting her way through a rear-entry sex scene seem more distracting and heavy-handed than anything else.

Incidentally, Vallee and Hornby’s insistence on presenting their protagonist as a fully formed sexual being is one of the film’s most refreshing qualities, and the truest mark of its fidelity to its ardent and lusty source material. As an attractive woman in her 20s traveling alone, Cheryl is acutely aware that every strange man she encounters is a potential predator — whether it’s the kind farm worker (W. Earl Brown) who offers her a hot meal and shower, or the fellow traveler who turns out to be a very real threat. But Cheryl is neither a passive victim nor a saint, and in a film of quietly understated moments that often prove more impressive than the whole, few are as telling as the one where she casually spies on a male hiker (Kevin Rankin) emerging nude from a dip in the river — a rare example of the female gaze at work in American movies.

“You sound like a feminist,” says a journalist (Mo McRae) who stops to interview Cheryl, the first “lady hobo” who’s crossed his path. It’s an amusing scene, and a slyly self-aware one as well: While “Wild” will surely be praised in the coming months for having a strong, well-written, flesh-and-blood female at its center, it’s to the film’s credit that it wears this badge of honor with a lightness that in no way undermines its sincerity.

Reviewed at Telluride Film Festival, Aug. 29, 2014. (Also in Toronto Film Festival — Gala Presentations.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

• Production: A Fox Searchlight Pictures release and presentation of a Pacific Standard production. Produced by Reese Witherspoon, Bruna Papandrea, Bill Pohlad. Executive producers, Bergen Swanson, Nathan Ross, Nick Hornby.
• Crew: Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee. Screenplay, Nick Hornby, based on the book by Cheryl Strayed. Camera (color, Arri Alexa digital), Yves Belanger; editors, John Mac McMurphy, Martin Pensa; production designer, John Paino; art director, Javiera Varas; set decorator, Robert Covelman; set designer, Andrae Covington; costume designer, Melissa Bruning; music supervisor, Susan Jacobs; sound (Dolby Digital), Dick Hansen; supervising sound editors, Ai-ling Lee, Mildred Iatrou Morgan; sound designer, Lee; re-recording mixers, Andy Nelson, Lee; special effects coordinator, Bob Riggs; visual effects supervisor, Marc Cote; visual effects, Fake Digital Entertainment; stunt coordinator, Alex Terzieff; associate producers, Chuck Ryant, John O’Grady, T.K. Knowles, Cheryl Strayed, Jeffrey Harlacker; assistant director, Urs Hirschbiegel; casting, David Rubin.
• With: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Gaby Hoffmann, Kevin Rankin, W. Earl Brown, Mo McRae, Keene McRae.

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Reese Witherspoon Takes a 1,100-Mile Hike in the Remarkably Fluid Wild

When Reese Witherspoon staggers onto the Pacific Crest Trail under an oversize backpack in the smart, shapely film of Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Wild, she’s the latest in a line of protagonists dating back hundreds if not thousands of years — people who embark on long wilderness walks to cleanse themselves of the accretions of civilization, terrible sin, or grief. Crucial to such stories is intense suffering, both physical (blisters, abrasions, sundry assaults on the flesh) and emotional (loneliness, fear, punishing memories). Women, however, weren’t always allowed to set off on epic journeys — they generally ended up in convents, taking the veil. That’s what makes Wild and Robyn Davidson’s earlier, somewhat similar Tracks so appealing. Strayed and Davidson are testing themselves physically, just like men. (Men appear in both memoirs to wonder aloud how a little lady could do such a thing.) And not only do they not take the veil, they allow themselves to have casual sex on the road. (It’s no coincidence that the movie has Strayed’s mother — who enrolls in college alongside her daughter — asking Cheryl the definition of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck.”) Freeing themselves from society and in defiance of cautionary mansplaining, these are heroines of the purest, most literal “women’s lib” stories.

Working from a deft script by the novelist Nick Hornby, director Jean-Marc Vallée ( Dallas Buyers Club ) weaves Strayed’s wrenching memories through shots of her trudging … and trudging … and trudging … from Southern California to the Bridge of the Gods, which separates Oregon from Washington State. As she lets loose with obscenities over her latest misstep, there comes a flurry of images: her precious, upbeat single mom (Laura Dern) reaching out; herself as a little girl in a drugstore running with antiseptic for her mother’s bruises; a teacher reading an Adrienne Rich poem (“Denying her wounds came from the same source as her power”); a beloved horse; a series of terrible X-rays … and then it’s back to the trail for more groaning and swearing. The soundtrack is extraordinary. Songs from the Shangri-Las, Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Portishead, and many others drift in and out, sometimes taken up by Strayed as she heads into the scrubby landscape toward a mountain a long way away. The fragmentation is remarkably fluid. The pieces are all of a piece.

Witherspoon doesn’t look as hardy as the real Strayed, who shows up in a series of photos beside the credits. But her small stature adds to the movie’s charm. Witherspoon’s edginess makes her easy — and fun — to read; her face registers every bump on the path. She has always been an actress who “indicates” — i.e., telegraphs her emotions — but up through Walk the Line, her tics were in the service of her tightly wound characters. It was only in the past few years, in her evident quest to be America’s sweetheart, that she wrinkled her large brow and worked her big jaw for the sole purpose of looking adorable. In Wild, though, her scrunchy face looks like the upshot of braininess, restlessness, having a motor that runs too fast. It captures the feeling of Strayed’s prose, which can seem a mite self-centered but is always processing. Wild is not the sort of book — or movie — in which the heroine strives to achieve “oneness” with the natural world. The aim is to put the pieces of her past into a coherent order and, in doing so, turn a screwed-up life into something more positive (writing a book about how she turned her screwed-up life into something more positive, for example).

Witherspoon — who co-produced the film — is always at the center, but she’s not the whole show. There’s Dern, of course, who’s lovable as always, though there are too many shots in which she’s radiantly bedraggled, poised to offer inspirational life lessons. (Her life lessons were more profound in Enlightened, pumped out to keep a sinking ship afloat.) Thomas Sadoski plays the husband on whom Strayed compulsively cheated after her mother’s death and with whom she maintains an intimate if wary friendship — a model for what Gwynnie P. now calls “conscious uncoupling.” Elsewhere, I liked W. Earl Brown as an old tractor-puller, little Evan O’Toole doing a chorus of “Red River Valley” that might make you blubber, and especially Mo McRae as an enthusiastically oblivious writer for The Hobo Times who thinks he has found his cover girl. A couple of male bowhunters look like they wandered in from Deliverance, but the point hits home. Single women can never lower their guard.

Wild has a fair number of product placements, some well earned. (REI really did help out Strayed by sending a better-fitting pair of boots to her on the trail.) But the most prominent is for the Pacific Crest Trail itself. The folks up there better ready themselves for an influx of women going solo. Cuts, bruises, and horrible hygiene have never looked so glamorous.

*This article appears in the December 1, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

• reese witherspoon
• cheryl strayed
• movie review
• new york magazine

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Culture | Film

Wild - movie review: 'Reese Witherspoon is incredible'

All children, especially little girls, are taught that it’s dangerous to talk to strangers. Horror movies often send a similar message. By contrast, this adaptation of a 2012 memoir by Cheryl Strayed — though it pays homage to the stuffed-animals scene in Psycho — fans our paranoia, only deftly to diffuse it. During a three-month, 1,100-mile trek across America, our heroine (Reese Witherspoon) is forced to do some hitch-hiking. As she stands by a road we hear her internal musings: “Hi, I’m an unaccompanied female. Want to give me a ride, so that you can rape and dismember me?”

As well as wit, Nick Hornby's screenplay offers gross-out moments (watch Cheryl peel off a putrid toe-nail! Gaze on her poo!) and copious amounts of cussing. F***! It's like a feminist voyage of discovery for South Park junkies.

In flashbacks we see Cheryl’s working-class mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) euphorically playing with her children. We haven’t even met Cheryl’s abusive, alcoholic dad but the song blaring in the background (The Shangri-Las’ I Can Never Go Home Anymore) speaks volumes about the precarious set-up.

Years later, Bobbi, aged just 45, is dead from cancer. A grief-crazed Cheryl starts cheating on her husband, gets hooked on heroin, finds herself pregnant (the father could be one of several guys) and has an abortion. All of which prompts her decision to follow the Pacific Crest Trail. Typically though, Cheryl pops 12 condoms into her knapsack.

Some critics have accused Witherspoon of being too clean-cut for the role. I think she's incredible. In Freeway (1996) and Election (1999) she plays teens so determined not to be preyed upon that they acquire their own wolfish glint. Since then the actress has become synonymous with sweet and swishy blonde-ness. In Wild, all her strengths merge.

True, she may be a tad long in the tooth to play a character who, over the course of the film, ages from 20 to 26. People keep referring to Cheryl as a “young woman”. Witherspoon looks like a woman. Nothing, though, can blunt the force of this love story. At one point, Cheryl swallows some of Bobbi’s ashes (she’s consumed by her mother; it makes sense that she tries to eat her, too).

In real-life Strayed is a fan of Alice Munro. And the influence of the Canadian writer can be felt in many of the (exquisitely) peculiar details. Cheryl is a wild thing long before she reaches the great outdoors. That she’s tamed neither by the landscape nor the film-makers provides the best kind of happy ending.

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