Jean-Marc Vallee’s (‘Dallas Buyers Club’) adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir Wild is intimate, if emotionally restricted.
Often, what makes memoirs so engrossing on the page are also what restricts their eventual film adaptations: their spoken honesty. At the heart of many memoirs’ success and emotional resonance —like, from what I’ve been told, Cheryl Strayed’s New York Times bestseller Wild — is their unflinching commitment to telling their life story, warts and all.
But thanks to the showing-not-telling nature of filmmaking or general restrictions in Hollywood, many adaptations can’t quite accomplish the same feats. See, for example, Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Running with Scissors. Oddly enough, these limitations are what make Jean-Marc Vallee’s adaptation of Wild resonate and also alienate. Strayed’s journey lends itself into a beautiful, if just skin-deep, cinematic journey of one’s own sense of worth found within a thousand-mile hike.
Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), with her life in shambles and her marriage recently falling apart, decides to use this fork in her road to do something daring: walk the Pacific Crest Trail by herself for three long, hot, grueling months in late 1994. Guided mainly by her thoughts, memories and regrets, her personal struggle also serves as a metaphor for her own life. Her downfalls and problems echo deep inside herself and the film’s spine.
There’s no denying Wild for its beauty, thanks mainly to Yves Belanger’s grounded cinematography and Vallee’s intimate direction. Even when exploring Strayed’s ugly past, there’s a natural prettiness around it, much like the Trail itself. This allure parallels the movie’s reflexive meditation on the author’s journey, which allows its protagonist’s struggles to be seen and heard, but also provides distant examination on Strayed’s character and tribulations. And yet, while these opposite storytelling methods flow together nicely in the film’s pacing, they also give way to some one-dimensional supporting characters and fractured narratives.
Whether by fault of Strayed’s perception of her tale or Vallee’s film being held back by a two-hour running time, many of the men in Strayed’s travels end up becoming little more than suspected rapists, sexually-driven men with mostly good, if primarily unseen, intentions or all-out great men, with little to no personalities in-between. It’s an interesting reversal, to say the least, on filmmaking techniques of yesteryear, but also limits the characters besides Strayed to being little more than one-note fixtures. Even some of the female roles in her life are fairly limited, including important figures like her mom (Laura Dern).
Likewise restricting Vallee’s film is its glossing of imperative events in Strayed’s life. While this film is meant to be more of a spiritual journey than outright character study, pivotal events in the protagonist’s life, like her heroin addiction and destroyed marriage of seven years, are only seen in brief details, living some of the movie’s important subplots impactful only from a distance.
As the movie’s progresses, with many of Strayed’s words being heard in abridged narrations, the film’s look at the author’s mediations become repetitive and incessant. This loses some of the emotional impact the filmmakers desperately strive to create. Wild, however, can sometimes take these narrative flaws to its benefit. By being shortsighted and unintentionally restrained at times, Vallee’s film feels more human and low-key, which benefits how it ultimately displays Strayed.
Witherspoon, carrying the movie in primarily a one-woman show, despite some fine supporting performances all around, gives as raw, honest and naked a portrayal as she can give. While not astounding, it’s the kind of emotionally subtracted and genuinely humble lead that’s rare for a Hollywood leading lady, much less one with an Oscar under her belt. Early on, it subtracts itself from the glitz and glamor of its production, and, by breaking that barrier, makes Wild feel as sincere as it needs to be to succeed—something it ultimately does.
Through recreating if just a fraction of Strayed’s beloved stream of consciousness, captured very vividly by the movie’s frantic-but-delicately-controlled editing from Martin Pensa and Vallee, as John Mac McMurphy, Wild does indeed capture what makes the original text so renowned. While its honesty is, predictably, lost at times and its message just a tad too obvious — both in its storytelling and visual metaphors — to make the movie excel, it’s the underlying dedication to tenderness that shines here. For this is what drives the adaptation through its equally troublesome quest to bring Strayed’s story to the screen.
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
