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Reese Witherspoon is a woman on several kinds of journeys in 'Wild'
(FOX SEARCHLIGHT/ANN MARIE FOX)
When, at a crux in her adult life, she decided to pick a new surname for herself, Cheryl Nyland chose "Strayed." Because she had.
The road to becoming a good student, a good wife, a good friend — let alone a "good girl" — she had walked off all those carefully mapped routes. Gone rogue, gone bad, gone missing.
Until, finally, she decided to get back on the path.
Literally.
"Wild" is the based-on-fact story of a complicated, difficult, very real woman who didn't know where she was going. So she got a couple of guidebooks and charted a new trail, along the Pacific Coast, and started walking. Alone.
We've seen some stories like this before recently. "127 Hours," with James Franco caught in that crevice. "Into the Wild," with Emile Hirsch setting out woefully unprepared. Or the more recent, and more similar, Australian walkabout film with Mia Wasikowska, "Tracks."
But "Wild" isn't really about that.
Because while it, like those movies, is based on fact, for Cheryl Strayed the trail was also an extended, inescapable metaphor — a made-real illustration of every hard road she'd ever found herself on, every disastrous detour she'd ever taken.
It's a fine film, made with poetry and intelligence. For that, some credit has to go to Jean-Marc Vallee and screenwriter Nick Hornby. Vallee showed his fondness for dreamy images in "The Dallas Buyers Club"; Hornby, his deftness with adaptation in "An Education."
And to their credit, neither man gets in the way of this woman's story. Because it is a woman's story and — besides its original author — it has a couple of surprising women involved.
The first is Laura Dern, here cast in flashbacks as Cheryl's mom. Since her teen years, Dern has always been a rubbery, rubbed-raw presence. Here, she finds real sweetness in a single mother trying to do her best, working hard to put mac-and-cheese on the table and — most importantly — a sense of possibility in her child's heart.
The second is Reese Witherspoon, who owns this movie in a way she hasn't since "Walk the Line." There's always been a steel-magnolia determination to her — it's the way, in "Election" or even "Legally Blonde," she just stuck out that chin of hers like the prow of a ship and sailed on, through everything.
Her performance here has already garnered awards buzz, and talk about how "brave" it is (a metaphor for no makeup) or "naked" (not a metaphor at all; she has a couple of brief nude scenes).
But the real bravery comes from her playing a woman who makes mistakes (and instead of dwelling on them, learns from them). The real nakedness is when she shows us Cheryl's selfishness, impatience, self-destructiveness — all those things that don't necessarily make up a Hollywood heroine but do make up a real person.
Vallee and Hornby could have shaped the movie more than they did; after following Cheryl for months through the wilderness, we expect it to build to an extraordinary epiphany. Instead, it ends with a quieter kind of healing as she realizes, whatever she's gone through — in life and on the trail — she's come out whole on the other side.
But that's very human, too and it's that kind of flawed humanity that "Wild" is really about. We stumble, we catch ourselves, we fall, we get up. We go on. And if we're lucky enough to have had one special person in our lives growing up, we know enough to pause occasionally and thank them — and, also, just look around, and smell the air, and wonder.
Ratings note: The film contains sexual situations, brief nudity, substance abuse and strong language.
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee. With Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern. Now playing in New York.
★ ★ ★ ½