Dropped straight into the seemingly hopeless nadir of Cheryl Strayed’s journey of redemption from the opening sequence, Reese Witherspoon sits atop a pine-flecked vista, pulls a toenail from her bloodied foot, and tosses one of her hiking boots down a ravine with an accompanying expletive. It’s funny, unbearable, cruel, but it’s not indicative of a film that leads you to many forks in the road, but doesn’t necessarily take you down the path you'd expected.
Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallee has taken the real life memoirs of Strayed and tapped into those incidental moments that make up life, and in doing so created a work of inspirational and relatable resonance that is much more than just a stellar welcome back performance from Reese Witherspoon.
Seemingly running away from heartbreak, drug addiction, and a fractured family unit, Cheryl Strayed (Witherspoon) decides to embark on a 1,100 mile solo hike across the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a landscape that takes in scorching deserts, snow capped mountains, the odd suspect hunter, and a flashback’s worth of demons for our repentant rambler to outpace.
