Wild

The Oscar Reese With­er­spoon won for Walk the Line must be get­ting awful­ly lone­ly on that shelf. One intu­its as much from this tri­al-by-nature biopic about a for­mer drug addict who turned her train-wreck life around by walk­ing the 1100 mile Pacif­ic Crest Trail then writ­ing a book about it. With­er­spoon braves the ele­ments, looks unkempt in hik­ing gear, does artis­tic nudi­ty dur­ing the character’s bad-girl moments, and gen­er­al­ly approach­es redemp­tion via an Acad­e­my Awards show­case. Just watch her when this hill-walk­ing new­bie loads her pack with so much gear, she can’t get it off the floor. But she tries, she strug­gles, and, by gol­ly, she makes sure she we notice her doing it.

Hav­ing optioned Cheryl Strayed’s mem­oir at gal­ley stage, Witherspoon’s evi­dent­ly the mov­ing force here, and you won­der whether French-Cana­di­an direc­tor Jean-Marc Vallée’s feat of guid­ing Matthew McConaugh­ey and Jared Leto to sundry awards last year land­ed him this gig. Prob­a­bly not, giv­en the loca­tion shoot­ing the sum­mer of 2013, but mere­ly ask­ing the ques­tion seems to chime with a gen­er­al tone of contrivance.

How con­trived? Has any human being on this earth ever uttered the line, ​“I’m going to walk myself back to the woman my moth­er thought I was”? That’s per­haps the most bla­tant clunk­er in Nick Hornby’s screen­play adap­ta­tion, which threads in con­tex­tu­al­is­ing flash­backs every oth­er step of the way as the deter­mined pro­tag­o­nist sets her­self against an implaca­ble land­scape. Pre­sum­ably, this is sup­posed to make us care for Cheryl in a way we nev­er real­ly did for Mia Wasikows­ka in the the­mat­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar Aussie female solo-trek saga Tracks, but what it actu­al­ly accom­plish­es is to stop us expe­ri­enc­ing the ebb and flow of Witherspoon’s unfold­ing jour­ney, drain­ing the sto­ry of the sense of hard-won accom­plish­ment we need to feel if we’re to buy its life-chang­ing effect.

Where the ambi­gu­i­ty and ambiva­lence of Emile Hirsch’s doomed way­far­er in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild at least allowed the view­er to fig­ure out just what they thought about him, that work’s already laid out here in a too-neat equa­tion where­by fin­ish­ing the walk will boost Cheryl’s self-con­fi­dence so she can accept her painful past and move on. Vallée’s slinky edit­ing skills are cer­tain­ly on dis­play as he shows us the flick­ers of mem­o­ry glint­ing through Witherspoon’s present tra­vails, with an affect­ing Lau­ra Dern leav­ing the strongest impres­sion as the moth­er whose hopes of improv­ing her own chaot­ic domes­tic lot offers sign­post­ed fore­shad­ow­ing of the nar­ra­tive to come.

Any hint, how­ev­er, of cap­tur­ing the true quick­sil­ver qual­i­ty of inte­ri­or mono­logue is kiboshed by par­celling out her back­sto­ry in neat sequen­tial gob­bets as she ven­tures along the path. Of course, we feel her iso­la­tion, her under­stand­able wari­ness about being a lone woman fear­ful of male sex­u­al preda­tors, but the film lacks the aes­thet­ic courage to ren­der the open-air dura­tion which might allow us com­mu­nion with her feat of endurance. In the end, Wild is just so tame and pre-packed it’s hard­ly wor­thy of its title.