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Wild Movie Review

Wild is a 2014 biographical adventure drama film directed by Jean-Marc Vallee and starring Reese Witherspoon. It’s such a beautiful and inspirational movie.

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“I always wanted a room with a view“

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Cheryl Strayed, a recently divorced woman, decides to start a new life by hiking along the 1,100 mile-long Pacific Crest Trail. She begins to discover herself as she goes along her trek. When I first watched this movie at a festival back in 2015 I loved it. Watching it now after almost a decade I am still in love with this movie and I appreciate everything that it does wonderfully. It’s a great example of how to do biopics and road trip flicks right.

Based on a memoir and directed by the great Jean-Marc Vallee, this is one of his most accomplished filmmaking efforts to date, a film that he directed with a lot of confidence in storytelling, structure and tone. Everything clicked in its place here, which is not a small feat for this type of movie that could very easily fall into that overly sentimental trap.

Wild depicts life as it is – full of joy and suffering, beauty and ugliness. Although somewhat familiar and conventional, the flashbacks were still quite moving, especially for those who have experienced the pain of losing a family member to cancer. That part of the movie was immensely relatable and heartbreaking to me. Laura Dern is so wonderful as the mother of our heroine – she is both a tragic and an inspiring character as she remains a bright light even toward her untimely demise.

The mother-daughter relationship was quite beautiful, though I would have personally discarded the abuse subplot that was unnecessary to the overall story. For the most part those flashbacks worked as they gave us great insight into the protagonist’s tragic history, but admittedly more ambiguity would have been a better way to go with this type of material. That especially goes for the film’s ending that states everything that we’d already known from all of the preceding scenes.

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But the editing and pacing were pretty superb and the structure of flashbacks interspersed with Cheryl’s journey was excellent and emotionally rewarding. The highlight, though, was still the trek itself. This is where the film operated best as the road trip is both highly adventurous and inspiring as well as dark, suspenseful and even funny and silly at the same time. There is a wonderful sense of humor that the film has – that hobo scene was absolutely hilarious in its dialogue. It was wonderful witnessing a film that was inherently dark, but also light and joyous and warm when it was necessary.

Reese Witherspoon was just superb as Cheryl Strayed. This was perfect casting as she looks and acts the part while being consistently believable and powerful in all of her emotional scenes. This is a subtle, nuanced performance that was very much grounded in reality. She felt like a real person and I could not see acting at any time from her. Thus, she should have won an Oscar that year.

Wild is gorgeously shot. The movie makes perfect use of its stunning backdrops and it made me want to go on that trek myself. But the film also honestly depicted just how gruesome and exhausting this type of proceeding would be as they did not flinch back from showing us every single horrible thing that could go wrong from a broken nail to terrible weather conditions to that staggeringly huge backpack that acted as a great comic relief in its own way.

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The movie is also tenderly scored, so well paced and consistently engaging from start to finish. It’s a great adventure story that has great insight into how people operate after personal tragedies. It also cleverly depicts what women go through. That element of potential rape while on the journey was very well done as it depicts that women go through life being reasonably scared, but sometimes they can be overly paranoid too. They also depicted how everybody would go out of their way to help her because of her great looks, which was another truthful observation in a film full of them.