Directed by:
Jean-Marc ValléeScreenplay:
Nick HornbyCinematography:
Yves BélangerCast:
Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Gaby Hoffmann, Kevin Rankin, W. Earl Brown, Mo McRae, Ted Rooney, Cheryl Strayed (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
In WILD, director Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club), Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) and Academy Award nominated screenwriter Nick Hornby (An Education) bring bestselling author Cheryl Strayed's extraordinary adventure to the screen. After years of reckless behavior, a heroin addiction and the destruction of her marriage, Strayed makes a rash decision. Haunted by memories of her mother Bobbi (Academy Award nominee Laura Dern) and with absolutely no experience, she sets out to hike more than a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail all on her own. WILD powerfully reveals her terrors and pleasures --as she forges ahead on a journey that maddens, strengthens, and ultimately heals her. (Fox Searchlight Pictures US)
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Reviews (13)
There are two reasons to check out these spiritual odysseys like Wild or Into The Wild: the haunting scenery and spiritual cleansing, or at least the psychological nitty-gritty of a main character full of opinions, attitudes and experiences that come into direct confrontation with the question of whether this or that decision is good or bad. With a little imagination, everyone will find themselves, at least for a while in some passages. They have done it cleverly and for good measure put in basically all the negative model situations that can happen to a person from an early age (a bully father, illness, poverty, drugs, etc.). Wild is less psychedelic and puts more emphasis on family, relationships and the formation of what one should have, or not have in life and what one should prioritise. Reese Witherspoon is convincing and solid, but doesn't, as it tends to do, get under the skin as she should, as despite all the blood and sweat it's still just a bedtime story, or rather a good morning one.
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I found the Emilio Estevez’s recent, similarly conceived The Way, in which a father embarks on a journey to find his dead son, more to my liking. It had more interesting interactions between the characters whom the protagonist encountered on his journey. Wild contains a few cool scenes, has a pleasant outdoor atmosphere and Reese Witherspoon holds the movie together. But the flashbacks depicting her relationships with the people from her past do not drive the film forward as much as they should. In comparison, Aron Ralston’s life in flashbacks in 127 Hours was much more powerful and, together with the situation the protagonist had to get out of, managed to completely captivate me. However, Wild still remains a good film worthy of three and a half stars.
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A conventional travel drama about the search for oneself, which Jean-Marc Vallée is able to enrich with interesting flashbacks, most of the time. They develop several themed storylines that focus on the magnetic Reese Witherspoon. Her transformation from a frightened novice who isn’t able to lift her own backpack to queen of the PCT is so impressively experienced, so much so that one also forgets balancing on the edge of kitsch, a bit of amateurish symbolism and a stretched last third. Not that Hornby's "book-like" screenplay helps with its pronounced durability and depth, but as a pleasant spiritual trip through a beautiful landscape for one evening, it's absolutely okay.
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When you cheat and take drugs, you become a prostitute... What is surprising is that the Wild is also good in terms of the intimate and chamber line "lonesome Witherspoon - inhospitable nature - endless purifying walk - the eternal self-question of the heroine". On the contrary, on this level, it does the job really well. To the extent that it makes you want to take a bag pack, go on a solitary hike and at the same time clear your head. The only drawback are the unnatural flashbacks, which at first can do with only hints/flashes in a nice way, but the closer Cheryl's journey comes to an end, the more literal and didactic they are. But what it only takes is one alpaca and everything what should be said becomes instantly clear.
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Though Wild is very well rhythmised in twenty-minute segments, due to the logic of the plot new revelations cannot reverse the course of events, but only contribute to our understanding of the protagonist. Especially in the final third, we could criticise the film for the fact that it suffers from a low level of action and structural repetitiveness. However, if we don’t judge it by the standards of mannishly linear “action” films, the narrative cyclicity with the returning of motifs as fixed ideas (instead of development of those motifs) is conversely what makes Wild a unique film that is both outwardly and inwardly feminist. 80%
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