Wild

Wild is about a trial by fire for someone who plays with matches. That someone is Cheryl Strayed, who, in 1995, hiked the thousand-plus miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with very tender feet. She wasn't a precocious searcher, like Christopher McCandless, or an experienced mountaineer like Aron Ralston; she was recovering from loss, addiction, and divorce, and this challenge was her cleanse. I haven't read her memoir—which wasn't published until 2012—but it would appear that its adapters have distilled from her complicated life a few boilerplate gobbets of optimism and self-determination. In the final scene, Sheryl physically crosses her metaphorical bridge, but Reese Witherspoon cuts a fine figure of what it's like to be at a crossroads.

There are times, though, when the script (by Nick Hornby) and the direction (by Jean-Marc Vallée) seems too inchoate, or too insensitive in its treatment of Sheryl. Perhaps the strangest miscalculation comes at the very beginning—which has the virtue of making it easy to forget by film's end. We open on a black screen and coital-sounding noises which are revealed to be agonized huffs. This bump in Sheryl's road is both graphic and upsetting—she rips off a toenail and loses a boot—but weighs very lightly on the plot overall. In another scene, Sheryl finds herself hitchhiking. The driver who stops doesn't pick her up but claims to be a reporter from The Hobo Times. It's a pleasurably inexplicable moment—he snaps her picture and logs a quote into the notepad stored in his shirt pocket—but Sheryl reacts like a stolid nitwit, and there's something hollow and stoogey about Witherspoon's delivery. Sheryl's feminism—which is folded into her naïveté—is the butt of the joke. 

Least accountable of all the misfires, however, is the closeted eroticism imposed on the flashbacks involving her brother Leif (Keene McRae). Perhaps, in a scene where he comes home with a friend and asks their doting mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) what's for dinner, the intention is to show that he's saddling Bobbi with stereotypically female obligations that Sheryl does not approve of. Bobbi has, in fact, broken from Sheryl and Leif's abusive father to raise them on her own, and is only now going back to school. But what is one to make of the dark look that Leif's companion casts at Sheryl, or the weird, possessive way Leif gives his mother a kiss? The oddly loaded atmosphere carries over to a scene where brother and sister are in bed together talking about Bobbi, who's dying of cancer. And when Sheryl convinces her brother to commit a horrific act after Bobbi's death, the toll that this event takes on the siblings' relationship is never made clear. One has no idea where their relationship stands when Sheryl is on her hike; their only contact is a brief, generic message that she leaves on his answering machine.

All of this casts an obscure pall over the saintly Bobbi, who Sheryl identifies as the love of her life. Bobbi is the ideal that Sheryl is working toward, and if anyone can make this ideal convincing as a living, breathing person, it's Dern. Bobbi is so full of love that it makes her clumsy; a snapshot of her backing into a wall, arms outstretched, gets repeated again and again. It's the happy place that Sheryl returns to: her imagination's greatest hit. But Bobbi is also frail. She can't afford to take anything for granted, though it's her life's work to see that her children can. Vallée puts a halo around her perseverance, and the sun does it for him when Dern is framed by a car window—it's like indie cinematography's primal scene. But only in light of those peculiarly staged family scenes does it seem to be implied that Bobbi's halo is blinding Sheryl's memory. The structure is like a turntable that loops her formative experiences; but, despite its satisfying rhythm, there's no room left for thinking that Sheryl might be an unreliable narrator, rewriting her experiences as she mulls them over, and this ultimately flattens her journey. The self-help elements become gospel. I assume this to be Hornby's influence; An Education, which he also adapted from a woman's memoir, was sympathetic to its narrator but curiously lacking in compassion for another marginalized figure, a Jewish con artist in postwar Europe. That film also ended with a voiceover that pretty much left it at "problem solved, move along." Sheryl is seen off by a computer-generated fox, to boot. Her spirit guide is precious.

Before I go any further, though, I don't want to be too down on the movie. Without overstating its status as a trailblazer, it's worth noting the refreshing point of view that the filmmakers—and, of course, Strayed—have taken on the wilderness-survival narrative. The intricate design of the film is glossy—rather like commercialized Malick—but absorbing nonetheless. There are a few instances where the filmmakers don't seem to have caught up with their structural merry-go-round; the timeline of Sheryl's marriage is particularly foggy, and though it's later established that Sheryl and Bobbi are in college together, it starts off looking like high school. But Vallée has a supple touch with the supporting cast, and a relaxed feel for rural eccentricities that's light without being trite. He also eases the plot into motion with a heavy backpack that bears both metaphoric and slapstick weight. In some scenes, as when she's interacting with fellow hikers at a waypoint for the first time, Witherspoon comes off as showbiz self-effacing, and it's hard to tell whether she's expressing Sheryl's difficulty at being ingratiating or if it's simply out of the actress's range. But she has a vigilant, righteous edge with Dern; when Sheryl asks Bobbi if it's hard having a daughter who's so much more sophisticated than Bobbi was at Sheryl's age, the statement feels exactly like the kind of regret that would clog the memory for years to come. Fortunately, Witherspoon is also very good on her own, as befits a solitary pilgrim or the subject of a movie that relies on her narration. This reliance on sound never puts a strain on the viewer because the sound design is superbly realized; it carries the movie more than the visuals, which is almost unheard of.

And Wild has an fresh subject. Though it is thorny to say so, Sheryl's gender does affect how her story is received and how it is told; her survival isn't threatened nearly to the degree that she is threatened with rape, and her femininity is (at least in part) what she comes to terms with. In what's played as both a funny quirk and a weathered existential awareness, she is apprehensive around the men she meets; for all the guys who only wish to help her along on her path, shadows of her father remain legion, including a gun-toting hick who stalks her. Near the end of the trail, Sheryl must agree to have a drink with a park ranger in order for him to reopen a post and retrieve her mail. As he's closing the station back up, a few hiker bros walk in, and he flatly refuses to get them their packages; he caves in only after Sheryl intervenes on their behalf. That night, when she's camping out with the non-threatening men, they point out to Sheryl that her looks—her femininity—is a form of privilege. And though these boys who have not been shown any favor on their trek have also not been in danger of being molested, and though their dialogue has been written and directed by men, this ambiguous homily is interesting to bear in mind at a time when the prevailing intellectual mission is to crack down on privileges of any sort. (Though one could argue that, to a degree, this is a female privilege that is nonetheless dependent on male privilege.) I'm interested in its being here because of the Mona Lisa smile we see on Witherspoon when the camera is fixed on her reaction; it at once undercuts the film's broader theme of empowerment, and deepens it.

Buried as it is under that very broad theme, what Sheryl achieves is much more nuanced than mere independence from men, or absolute liberation from the dangers they pose. Her victory is not over the abusers—because there will always be snakes in the grass—but over the protectors. She no longer needs her ex-husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski), who rescued her from the heroin addiction she suffered after Bobbi's death, and which incidentally caused her to cuckold Paul several times over. She no longer needs to be protected by a man (or by a guardian angel like her mother); that is what this trial has taught her. And given the disgraceful atrocities that men inflict on women every day (and the bogus backlashes these atrocities tend to provoke, even when they're only gently remarked on), as well as the zealous policing of pop-culture correctives, which are then spoonfed down our oversensitive throats—and all the recriminations to compare the scales of victimhood—Sheryl's lesson is refreshing in its raw practicality, its freedom from cant. She refuses to be a victim—especially of herself.