Wild (2014) ★★★★
The premise of this film is extraordinarily simple: Cheryl Strayed, a recently divorced woman, decides to walk the length of the Pacific Crest Trail with minimal preparation and almost no idea of the hardships she will endure on the way.
The film begins about halfway through the journey, with Cheryl looking at her grotesquely blistered feet and having to remove the nail, which has rubbed loose inside her ill-fitting boots, from the big toe on her right foot. After one boot falls down the rocky outcrop on which she is sitting, she curses and throws the other one after it, now left without any footwear. Nick Hornby's script has a flashback structure and the film continuously switches between Cheryl's journey up the West Coast of the US and her upbringing, marriage, university studies, fraught relationship with her mother and self-destructive behaviour.
As she does, Cheryl becomes somewhat of a minor celebrity amongst other hikers who recognise her from the literary references she leaves in the books along the way and becomes more knowledgeable about what she's doing – early on, she is reduced to eating cold mashed potato because she took the wrong type of gas for her camping stove – and combats her inner demons.
Both Reese Witherspoon, who plays Cheryl, and Laura Dern, who plays Cheryl's mother, were Oscar-nominated for their praiseworthy performances; nominations richly deserved, and Jean-Marc Vallée (The Young Victoria; Dallas Buyers Club) directs with style and control, using the smart, moving screenplay, tremendous scenery and music to tell Cheryl's story with palpable emotion.
Some aspects of the film reminded me of John Curran's 2013 film Tracks, in which Mia Wasikowska played Robyn Davidson, who walked the 1700 miles from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean in 1977, with both Strayed and Davidson forced to live with their own isolation, battle the elements and people doubting them, partly because of their gender. Both films benefit from the honesty, power and terrific performances by the female lead. Another similarity is American Sniper, in which the lead actor bought the rights to the memoir, helped develop the project and is a credited producer.
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