![]() Those usually have to do with Strayed’s mother, here portrayed as a warm, nurturing spirit who continually sacrificed her own intellectual and creative ambitions to care for Strayed and her brother. With an evocatively layered sound design and those shardlike flashbacks, Vallée especially succeeds in creating a convincing inner life for a woman who remains something of a cipher even at the film’s most confessional moments. Thankfully, screenwriter Nick Hornby and director Jean-Marc Vallée (“ Dallas Buyers Club”) have brought their virtuosity to bear on a narrative that unfolds episodically - literally one step at a time - but also poetically. ![]() Relying on the kindness of strangers, Strayed seems to reenter the world even as she trudges along on a fruitless quest to leave it behind.Īt first glance, “Wild” invites some obvious comparisons to other movies about reckless risk and solitary treks - Sean Penn’s masterful “ Into the Wild,” Emilio Estevez’s “ The Way,” about the Camino de Santiago, and this year’s “Tracks,” in which Mia Wasikowska starred as a figure similar to Strayed, a woman walking across Australia to exorcise her demons. These visions, while eloquent, are brief, as Strayed is continually pulled back to the present by the realities of the road or encounters with fellow travelers. Along the way, the particulars of Strayed’s life - her fraught relationship with her mother (played with radiant spontaneity by Laura Dern), her heroin use and extramarital affairs - come into focus by way of jagged flashbacks. She loses some of the gear but still carries enough emotional baggage to keep her overburdened throughout a journey that will take her through the searing Mojave Desert to a freak snowstorm and finally the crags and ranges of the Pacific Northwest. Grieving the loss of her adored mother, guilt-ridden by the dissolution of her marriage and the indiscretions that preceded it, Strayed sets out impulsively and alone, her brand-new equipment so heavy that she can’t even stand under its bright, shiny, utterly impractical weight. In “ Wild,” the stirring adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir, Reese Witherspoon delivers an admirably restrained, un-glamorous performance as the author, who at age 26 hiked 1,110 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon in a ritual of physical endurance, philosophical reflection and spiritual cleansing.
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