Is Reese Witherspoon heading for Oscar #2? Reviews for Wild are IN...

Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern and director Jean-Marc Vallee bring Cheryl Strayed's best-selling memoir to life on screen

Many directors specialize in one genre, but Vallee has plunged into wildly disparate arenas. He went from a coming-of-age story called C.R.A.Z.Y to a lush historical epic, The Young Victoria. Last year’s Oscar-winning film, Dallas Buyers Club, explored a little-known part of the history of the AIDS epidemic. Now in Wild, based on a best-selling memoir by Cheryl Strayed, Vallee has crafted a vivid wilderness adventure film that is also a powerful story of family anguish and survival. All of these films focus on very strong-willed individuals, but the completely different worlds they bring to life testify to an astute directorial hand.

Vallee’s latest offering is alternately harrowing and heartbreaking, but laced with saving bursts of humor. The popularity of Strayed’s book and the strong performance by Reese Witherspoon should ensure an audience for the movie and bring more accolades to the director, as well as to screenwriter Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education), who adapts the book with finesse

Dallas Buyers Club earned Oscars for both its lead and supporting actors, and it’s conceivable that the new film could repeat the trick for two actresses.

Witherspoon transforms herself both physically and emotionally into this hardened yet needy young woman seeking to re-invent herself after a series of personal tragedies. She chose this marathon hike almost on a whim, and she was completely unprepared for the challenges. As Strayed wrote in her book, “I hadn’t factored in my lack of fitness, nor the genuine rigors of the trail, until I was on it.” Witherspoon captures all the conflicting, dizzying emotions that the adventure stirs in her.

Witherspoon is matched by Laura Dern, who plays her mother, Bobbi, an inspiring life force who is stricken with a devastating medical diagnosis

it’s really Dern who tears at our emotions during her scenes with Witherspoon. Bobbi’s life journey, cut tragically short by illness, is as compelling as Cheryl’s. This is one of the most honest, complex portrayals of a mother-daughter relationship that we’ve seen in any recent movie, and the loss of her mother helps to explain Cheryl’s utter disorientation and her search for a major challenge to bring her back to life.

Inevitably a film like this is going to be episodic, but the adventures that Cheryl has on the trail are always startling, from her encounters with wildlife to the nightmare of a freak snowstorm. Yet the human encounters also enrich her journey, and here Hornby’s ability to bring minor characters to life and Vallee’s fine work with an extraordinary supporting cast make all of these episodes richly compelling. The director is helped by the exceptional cinematography of Yves Belanger, who takes us through varied landscapes from the scorching Mojave desert to the imposing mountains of northern California and Oregon.

The film remains equally compelling during the flashbacks.

Witherspoon doesn’t shy away from showing the dark sides of Cheryl’s character — her surrender to sexual excesses and drug addiction. Her battle for survival began a long time before she hit the wilderness trail, so her journey illuminates a whole series of internal as well as external struggles. Witherspoon’s inherent appeal keeps us on Cheryl’s side even through her self-destructive exploits, but there’s nothing sentimental about the actress’s tart portrayal.



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Jean-Marc Vallée's adaptation of the bestselling hiking tale has beautiful visuals and a great central performance, but doesn't trust those ingredients to carry the story.

It comes as no surprise that the movie version, starring Reese Witherspoon and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée from a script by British novelist Nick Hornby, hits plenty of poignant notes.

But despite the powerful elements of Strayed's real-life experiences, "Wild" goes out of its way to overstate the built-in sentimentalism

The result is two solid movies at odds with each other: a gentle ode to the wonders of the natural world and a more traditional account of a nervous breakdown.

At its center, however, Witherspoon excels as a committed figure battling through each rough day. So long as the action remains on the trail, Vallée stages an engaging survivalist tale that plays up the resolve on Witherspoon's face, complemented with the rich visuals of an expansive landscape.

"Wild" develops an emotional core from the payoffs of her recurring commitment.

Which is why it's so discouraging whenever the movie shifts to the past. The pratfalls of the "cancer movie" cliché come into play with tearful bedside moments as Strayed watches her mother fade away; other flashbacks to her childhood, when she coped with an abusive father, feel extraneous. The movie gives us too much information when the journey speaks for itself.

But even the contemporary scenes meander in parts, as hikes have a tendency to do, with throwaway moments including a random roadside encounter with a pushy journalist and another loose thread involving a possible sexual assailant in the woods. However, as with "Dallas Buyers Club," Vallée laces his conventional plot with snazzy music cues (Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" resonates particularly on several occasions) that smooth over a lot of the bumps along the way.

If nothing else, "Wild" offers a first-rate advertisement for the purifying abilities of the great outdoors. (PCT enthusiasts are likely to be pleased.) Cinematographer Yves Bélanger — who last captured the poetic depths of the American desert in Gus Van Sant's far more minimalist "Gerry" — develops a rich green-and-brown palette to match the lyrical relationship that Strayed develops with her surroundings.

"Wild" is so enamored with its setting that the story can feel like an intrusion. The journey is much more compelling than the reasons behind it. There's little in the way of shock or surprise about the drama that put Strayed on the trail, but the same could be said about the reasons for making a movie about it.



Grade: B-



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