Jean-Marc Vallée (2014)
This is the second movie of recent months based on the real-life memoir of a young woman on a marathon solo hike. In Tracks, the Australian Robyn Davidson treks 1,700 miles across the desert, from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. In Wild, Cheryl Strayed walks the 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), from the US border with Mexico to the US border with Canada. The film begins with images of an empty, mountainous terrain and the cries of an unseen woman. It sounds as if she’s having an orgasm; when Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) appears, we realise that the noise she’s making combines euphoria at having reached this point of her journey with the excruciating pain of a broken big toenail – but most of what follows in Wild is lacking in the vertiginous highs and lows that you expect in this kind of story. The poster announces that it’s based on an ‘inspirational best seller’ but Jean-Marc Vallée’s film is almost continuously miserable. It isn’t bad, though, and I couldn’t work out what was wrong with Wild until the end and, when I got home, I read up about Cheryl Strayed.
As Cheryl completes her journey, she finds herself at the Bridge of Gods on the Columbia River. Little did she realise, she tells us in a final voiceover, as she stood on the bridge that day, that a few years later she would meet, in exactly the same place, the man who would become her husband and the father of her children. Cheryl also takes this opportunity to muse about the mystery and uniqueness of human personality. The real Cheryl Strayed did the PCT trek in 1995; already established as a writer, she published Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2012. One can understand that Strayed feels, in retrospect, she ‘found’ herself as a result of the long journey and she may well express this strongly in her book but the film, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, consists, as you’d expect, of the journey as it happens – and the heroine’s epiphanies are few. Cheryl looks somewhat less dispirited as she approaches the end of the slog but who wouldn’t? One of the moments in Wild that rings truest comes when Cheryl confides in another hiker that she’ll be relieved when the walk is over but that she’s frightened too: she feels she’s still a long way from sorting herself out. I left Wild feeling that I’d rather have seen what happened next in Cheryl Strayed’s life.
The PCT is a well-known route and several of the people Cheryl encounters en route are fellow-trekkers. Unlike the heroine of Tracks, she isn’t well prepared: at the start, with a backpack so heavy she can barely stay upright, let alone walk, she’s almost comically inept. Nor, unlike Robyn Davidson, is she accompanied by animals – Cheryl has flashbacks for company. She’s doing the walk to get over the death of her beloved mother, the end of her first marriage, heroin addiction, and a chaotic, promiscuous sex life. The flashbacks feature all these issues but they don’t occur in a sequence that allows you to sort out exactly what happened when or the relationship between Cheryl’s various traumas. Her experience of these jumbled memories is of course more realistic than the usual structure of flashbacks in mainstream movies but it’s frustrating for the viewer. In other respects, Jean-Marc Vallée’s handling of the material is largely conventional. There’s a cameo from a rattlesnake. Information regularly pops up on screen to tell you what day of the journey this is and how many miles have been covered (although you rarely know where Cheryl is: as Richard Brody has pointed out, the geography is relegated to a minor supporting role). Cheryl reads poetry and lines from poems appear occasionally on screen too – with the irritating signature of the poet’s and Cheryl’s names together – ‘Adrienne Rich & Cheryl Strayed’ etc – and the date. I assume these are taken from Strayed’s actual journal but some of the lines are excessively apt: ‘But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep’ makes a predictable appearance.
Reese Witherspoon, who also co-produced the film, was onto Wild as a project very quickly: Witherspoon’s film company, Pacific Standard, had optioned Strayed’s memoir for film rights even before the book was published. Since she won a deserved Oscar for Walk the Line (2005), things haven’t worked out for Reese Witherspoon as well as she might have hoped. A self-discovery story that requires great physical effort and commitment and has her in nearly every frame must have appealed. Wild has duly delivered another Oscar nomination but the performance never quite catches fire. Witherspoon’s thirty-eight now (Cheryl Strayed was twenty-six when she did the PCT trek); her petite prettiness allows her to pass for younger but she’s not very physically expressive here. She looks drab and drops her voice to prove she means serious acting business. In doing so, she blankets Cheryl in glumness and obscures her own vitality (for me, she was often inaudible too). It’s clear that the loss of her mother Bobbi, who dies of cancer in her mid-forties, has prostrated Cheryl but less clear as to whether her sadness is mixed with guilt for having always been (as far as we see) a stroppy, ‘feminist’ wet blanket towards the fun-loving, optimistic Bobbi. In the flashbacks, Cheryl deplores her mother’s liking for James Michener, scolds her for preparing a meal for Cheryl’s eighteen-year-old brother, and informs Bobbi that she should regret having married the abusive, alcoholic jerk who was Cheryl’s father.
As Bobbi, Laura Dern, who’s just nine years older than Reese Witherspoon, has a flexibility of face and body that allows her to suggest changes in the mother’s age (more than Witherspoon is able to do with the daughter’s) – and show too Bobbi’s enduring vibrancy and innocence, until her final illness. Dern’s physicality and vividness make Bobbi alive and resonant in Cheryl’s memories. Among the many small parts, I liked Jan Hoag, drily witty as the wife of a tractor driver who brings a worse-for-wear Cheryl back to the couple’s house for a hot meal at an early point of the PCT, and Evan O’Toole, as a young boy she meets near the end of it and whose singing of ‘Red River Valley’ makes her cry. (I liked the shot too of Reese Witherspoon falling to her knees in tears after she’s met the boy – a backview dominated by the backpack but still expressive.) Cheryl Strayed herself appears, appropriately, as the driver of a truck who drops her screen reincarnation at the starting point of her journey.
17 January 2015
