WILD
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
Should 12 Years a Slave's Steve McQueen ever consider stepping down as mainstream cinema's premier sadist, Dallas Buyers Club's Jean-Marc Vallée seems to be positioning himself as a possible successor. While he stops short of breaking out a lash in this odyssey of self-discovery, he does open it with the grisly sight of Reese Witherspoon peeling off a toenail and discarding it as if it were a used bandage. As Matthew McConaughey proved last year, sometimes you need to suffer for your Oscar.
At the precipice of 40, when Hollywood typically loses interest in its onetime ingénues, Witherspoon has evidently decided that her career requires a change of direction. Displaying grim determination, she assumes the role of Cheryl Strayed, who's just embarked on a gruelling 18,000-kilometre trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. Having drifted into alcoholism, drug abuse and sex addiction (the unholy trinity of self-destructive behaviour) in the wake of a devastating personal loss, drastic measures are required to right her course. Given that she's hardly the athletic type, this punishing journey qualifies.
Endeavouring to lend this forced march some lyricism, Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby (adapting Strayed's best-selling memoir) treat the true story’s chronology as if it were magnetic poetry, shifting events about and lapsing into flashbacks on a whim. However, not even recurring hallucinations of Cheryl’s beloved mother (a beatific Laura Dern) and ill-advised introduction of a deeply symbolic CGI fox can mask the reality that this is rudimentary Point A to B storytelling, with the inevitable catharsis and self-actualization methodically inching closer with every minute that ticks off the runtime.
