Reese Witherspoon's WILD - Oscar Movie Review Special
I have been told all of my life to “enjoy the journey." My reply has ever been, “I can’t. I am destination oriented. I just wanna get where I’m going.” I freely admit that that is indeed a truly sad philosophy. Our lives, if you think about it, are all journeys, made up of moments great and small which ultimately make us who we are. I believe that that is the overarching message of the movie Wild. Once, some time ago, when I was bored, I asked my friend, “What shall we do now?” Her smart aleck reply purposely made to sound like new-agey balderdash was, “Let’s put on the ‘Cats’ album and be with the moment.” So, I suppose the key to "being with the moment" is to go ahead and be okay with who you are at any given moment, even if you are doing something rather stupid.
We have a nauseating hymn in our church called “Improve the Shining Moments." I loathe this song because life isn’t always a happy dance replete with a big fat bowl of cherries, though there is something to the tune's message of making our life moments count when we are in them, and if you screw up, try making the next moment better; “acknowledge, move on”, as they say. Wild certainly mirrors that philosophy.
Wild is a dramatic biographical film based on the 2012 memoir by Cheryl Strayed, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.” Reese Witherspoon brought a stark gritty realism to the screen in her portrayal of Cheryl Strayed, whose life crashes and burns after the death of her mother, Bobbi Grey, played with a natural ease and warmth by Laura Dern. Her deep despair over the death plunges her into a rabbit hole of self-destruction - drugs, meaningless sexual encounters, etc. - which ends her marriage. When she finally realizes she has lost herself and has become a person she neither likes nor recognizes, she, with the encouragement of her ex-husband Paul and best friend Aimee (portrayed respectively by Broadway veteran Thomas Sadoski and actress/writer Gaby Hoffmann), decides to heal herself and get her life back by traversing some 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. This was how Cheryl Strayed summed up her trek: “It was a huge physical undertaking for me to hike the PCT for 94 days, but it was also very much a spiritual journey. I turned to the trail as many people turn to the wilderness — at a time when I felt lost and desperate, when I was in a place where I didn’t know how to move forward. In many ways the trail taught me to literally just put one foot in front of the other again.”
Strayed’s 1995 journey of self discovery on the PCT began at the California/Mexico border, and ended in the Pacific Northwest. It was a trek in which she threw down a gauntlet and challenged Mother Nature to a duel. Mother Nature’s thrusts and parries included blistering heat, rattlesnakes, near starving hunger, freezing temperatures, snow, intense fatigue, the primal urges of a would-be rapist, thirst, and raging streams. She fought back with sheer iron will and a burning desire to finish what she’d started. Occasionally though, when things got rough, she was plagued with doubt by an inner voice that kept telling her it was okay to quit. Strayed’s is basically a story of a phoenix rising from the ashes. She successfully braved Mother Nature’s slings and arrows, accomplishing a feat that was light years away from her comfort zone. In her quest, Cheryl became a bit of a folk hero among fellow PCT hikers, not only for her determination, but also for things she wrote on notepads left at hiker checkpoint stations along the trail. These included not only her own thoughts, but snippets of poets like Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Frost.
The moments of Cheryl Strayed’s life were captured masterfully as a stream of consciousness by Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée. His brilliant editing is filled with dogged precision, zig-zagging back and forth between flashbacks, nightmares, dreams, and her experiences on the trail, and it grabs the viewer by the proverbial shirttails so that he is made also to feel her emotional pain, physical aches and pains, weariness, sickness after imbibing too much, her gratitude for little things like a hot shower, home-cooked food, a cool breeze, a song from a child, and joy in her ultimate triumph.
I must mention how very much I enjoyed the music in this film, and how well it fits each scene it accompanies. The soundtrack is more a collection of songs by varying artists than anything else, and includes, “El Condor Pasa” by Simon and Garfunkel, “Walk Unafraid” by folk duo First Aid Kit, “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen, Billy Swan’s rendition of “Don't Be Cruel,” “Something About What Happens When We Talk” by Lucinda Williams, “Tougher Than the Rest” by Bruce Springsteen, “The Air That I Breathe” by the Hollies, and “Knowing What I Know About Heaven” by Guy Penrod.
Wild's Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations for Witherspoon and Dern, respectively, are well deserved. They were both nominated for SAG Awards, but came away empty-handed from that awards ceremony. Reese Witherspoon also received a nod from the Golden Globes, a no-win for her as well. Other performances I enjoyed in Wild were provided by W. Earl Brown (Dan Dority from HBO’s Deadwood), playing a farmer named Frank whom Cheryl asks for food; Kevin Rankin (Breaking Bad and CBS’s Unforgettable), who plays a hiker in a state of nature, whom Cheryl happens upon bathing in the river, and who becomes a supporting voice for her; and one of my favorites, child actor Evan O'Toole, who plays Kyle, a young boy Cheryl encounters on the trail, who brings her to tears by singing “Red River Valley."
Wild, rated R for language and sexual content, is a decidedly good story, and a well-made cinematic effort. Cheryl Strayed, who consulted on Wild, felt it was snubbed by the Academy because it did not garner a Best Picture nomination. While I do agree it's a good story, I can also understand how it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Anyhow, that’s the way I see it.