Popcorn and Inspiration: ‘Wild’: Witherspoon’s Walkabout Warrants Watching

R | 1h 55min | Adventure, Biography, Drama | 19 December 2014 (USA)

The Appalachian Trail is 2,174 miles long. The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is 479 miles longer. Which is wild. Why do people brave hunger, thirst, heat, cold, pain, bugs, cougars, rattlesnakes, and thieves to hike these things? Especially alone? Especially single women, alone?

Because these mega-hikes are modern, secular cousins of the sacred, peripatetic rites of passage known as the pilgrimage and the Aboriginal Walkabout. All that nature walking, sacred or secular, accomplishes roughly the same thing: purging and healing by way of physical hardship, loneliness, silence, and beauty. Based on a true story, the very fine “Wild” depicts one woman’s inner transformation, out on the PCT.

Reese Witherspoon in “Wild.” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Hitting Bottom

Following the 1991 cancer death of her mother (Laura Dern), Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) wrecks her marriage with hard drugs and cheating. She hits the PCT in ’95, with no previous hiking experience. The Pacific Crest Trail is for black-belt-level hikers.

There are things that one really needs to know. Like, how even slightly-too-small hiking boots will rasp the toenails right off your feet when you’re crunching across the Mojave Desert, and how duct-tape-wrapped Tevas make a poor substitute. Had Cheryl known what she was getting herself into, she might never have started.

Packing gear at the trailhead, in her motel room, her first lesson is that the water bladder for her pack weighs a million pounds after filling it in the bathtub. It takes a 10-minute wrestling match just to stand upright with it. Still, she’s clearly thinking “How hard could it be?”

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) hiking through the desert, in “Wild.” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

The PCT

Finally she’s out there. It’s scorching; deadly, the thought of quitting is all-pervading and the trial-and-error learning starts: She bought the wrong gas canister for the stove. Now she gets to eat cold mush for weeks on end.

Bolting from her sleeping bag, she blows her giant red trail-whistle (it looks like Wile E. Coyote ordered it from the ACME Whistle Company). After much frantic bag-shaking, a tiny woolly bear caterpillar is ejected.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) fording a stream, in “Wild.” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

All of this is absolutely no fun for her but is often funny for us, experiencing her tribulations from the safety of our couches. Everything hurts constantly. As a fellow hiker says, “All the prep and training in the world can’t prepare you for the pain and the heat.” But Cheryl’s committed.

Reese Witherspoon and Michiel Huisman in “Wild.” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

There are many flashbacks of Cheryl’s downward spiral into depression; a classic spiral for someone with an abusive alcoholic father, codependent mother, and an addictive personality.

However, the upside of the addictive personality is that people who have it tend to be able to work harder and endure more pain than the average person. Cheryl has the grit to be able to move through (hike through) the daunting amounts of pain needed to free herself of the ghosts of her past.

Reese

Reese Witherspoon had already left her ditzy “Legally Blonde” period behind via an Oscar win as June Carter in “Walk the Line,” but “Wild” solidified her serious-leading-lady status.

Despite there being too much playing of the Simon & Garfunkel version of “I'd rather be a hammer than a nail,” the story is captivating and the Pacific Northwest and desert scenery are stunning.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) hiking near a lake, in “Wild.” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

The only thing that feels amiss is the anticlimactic ending—the trail just sort of peters out. Cheryl says “Thank you for everything the trail taught,” but something more revelatory feels called for, something like Aron Ralston’s (James Franco) harrowing escape from his forced vision quest in “127 Hours,” but that’s just my Pavlov’s dog-like conditioning wanting a Hollywood ending.

A vision quest is different. It’s a stationary pilgrimage of the soul: Four days and four nights in a 10-foot-diameter circle in the wilderness with no people, food, phone, computer, books, writing utensils, or tent. The outfits that run quests tell you (I’ve done four of them) that the most powerful visions are where you don’t feel like you had one.

These types of life-changing experiences don’t need to end with a bang. If you focus on the trail, or on the rocks, ants, pine needles, and whippoorwill birdsong in the night—you'll get where you’re going. A profound change is a given.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) hiking through a campground, in “Wild.” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Before renting “Wild,” watch “The Way“ (Martin Sheen on a pilgrimage). If you compare these two ambulatory quests—the secular PCT hike and the ”sacred” pilgrim’s way—you'll see they’re almost exactly the same thing.

If you try one yourself someday, learn all you can beforehand instead of running out the door like Bilbo Baggins. He was another initially clueless long-distance hiker who came back profoundly changed.

‘Wild’ Director: Jean-Marc Vallée Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Gaby Hoffmann Rated: R Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Release date: Dec. 19, 2014 Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Mark Jackson is the senior film critic for The Epoch Times. Mark has 20 years experience as a professional New York actor, a classical theater training, a BA in philosophy, and recently narrated the Epoch Times audiobook, “How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World”: https://www.thespecterofcommunism.com/en/audiobook/ Rotten Tomatoes page: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/critic/mark-jackson/movies