Wild (2014)

Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallée
Country: USA

Movie Review: Another great accomplishment for Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club”), “Wild”, was written by Nick Hornby (“An Education”), adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir of the same name. In 1994, Cheryl decides to hike 1,100 miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, an adventure of liberation and self-discovery that served to better cope with a complicated past. Along the way she is haunted by memories of a contented good mother (deceased due to cancer), a violent alcoholic father, a reckless brother, an accessible ex-husband, and some uncomfortable experiences driven by heroin and damaging behaviors. Making justice to its title, the film starts very frantically, with Reese Witherspoon - very convincing as Cheryl - getting angrily mad after losing a toenail and a boot in the mountains. The film keeps showing her untamed posture for a while until she calms down in the last moments of redemption and confidence regained. Along the journey a large number of strangers cross her way. Some of them are good souls and helpful, others are tricky and threatening, some others are TPC hikers as well, however the last encounter was memorable as she bumps into a kid and his grandmother in the most touching moment of the film. Vallée was brilliant on direction, focusing the fatigue and physical sores of a harsh journey that has simultaneously the aptitude to heal the mind. “Wild” can be as much rewarding for the viewer as it certainly was for Cheryl, and together with “Tracks”, also released this year, becomes another engaging biographical drama depicting a solitary journey along the nature. Not to miss!