Girl gone wild

In ‘Wild,’ Cheryl Strayed doesn’t take up the 1,000-mile trek just for her health: it’s her last roll of the dice, to prove she can do something that builds her up, instead of destroying her. It nearly ends up doing both.

When Reese Witherspoon loves something, you’d better believe she’s head over heels. She threw herself into two big movie projects last year — as producer for Gone Girl, which was adapted by author Gillian Flynn and directed by David Fincher; and as producer and lead actress for Wild, currently showing in cinemas. 

You think you’ve seen this movie before — isn’t this the one where James Franco goes hiking and ends up hacking off part of his arm to survive? But no, that was 127 Hours. Here, in Wild, Witherspoon plays another lost soul and lone wanderer, in search of something to redeem her admittedly wayward life.

Based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, we first see Witherspoon/Strayed yanking off one of her bloody  toenails. Her hiking boots are too small, and the toe looks red and gnarly, like it’s been through a meat grinder. Then she accidentally drops her boot off a cliff and, after a full-throated scream at the wilderness, chucks the other boot after it.

We wonder why people choose to get lost in the wilderness. It’s the theme of Jon Krakaeur’s Into the Wild, as well as 127 Hours. Not often do women take up the trail though, especially when it’s a thousand-mile march up the Pacific Crest, a point that’s made several times in the movie. (The males gawking at her make it a bit more unpleasant for Strayed.) At each marker along the trail, Strayed signs her name and leaves behind a little Emily Dickinson, a little Walt Whitman. We come to know what led her to disappear only gradually, through glimpses and flashbacks — a mother (Laura Dern) who was somehow too content, too happy with her lot; an embarrassment to her daughter, a college student who prefers life to be complicated. (As the real-life author puts it, “I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”) Strayed’s marriage is interrupted, there’s sickness in the family, and you begin to see what’s causing her to throw everything away.

Because Strayed is not taking up the 1,000-mile trek from California to Oregon just for her health: it’s kind of her last roll of the dice, to prove she can actually do something that builds her up, instead of destroying her. It nearly ends up doing both.

At first, it’s her hiking incompetence that threatens to do her in. Her backpack weighs more than she does — other hikers start nicknaming it “Monster.” She brings the wrong kind of fuel for her stove, so she’s forced to eat cold mush day after day. She’s surrounded by wolves and other canines at night. She’s forced to wrap her bare feet in masking tape until she can buy new boots. Clearly, this isn’t someone who should let outside of the city, let alone be romping through the desert.

But all this teaches her, and toughens her. She unloads a lot of unnecessary baggage — figuratively and literally — but not the James Michener bestseller that her mother begged her to read someday. She reflects on the things that led her to legally change her name to Strayed. “Cheryl Strayed.” A declarative sentence that’s almost a self-branding.

Witherspoon earns her Oscar nod here in a vehicle that lets her unleash her inner Tracy Flick, and much, much more. She goes full ugly, one of the surest routes to getting Oscar attention, but it’s not just a gimmick: you can tell Witherspoon really wanted to make this movie, and Gone Girl as well. Whatever her personal attachment to the subject matter, the common denominator seems to be women who are in some kind of peril in their lives (though you could argue that Ben Affleck was the one in peril in Gone Girl). How they find their way out, or how they don’t, makes for interesting cinema in a year where strong women roles were a little thin on the ground.

In case you don’t get the message — that a woman running wild is also capable of becoming prey — Strayed has numerous encounters with men who seem to take a less than kindly interest in her well-being on the trail. A couple of hunters circle around like unwanted dogs in heat. Others fit the profile of serial killers. But the real-life Strayed learned to detect the goodness in people, to harness their inherent kindness. She brings a civilizing aspect along the Pacific Crest Trail.

But of course, when she spots a dude she’s attracted to at a (gulp!) Jerry Garcia Night bar outing in Oregon, you can believe she’s ready for a night of lovin’. Sexuality doesn’t go away just because you’re stuck in the wilderness.

 The cool thing about Wild is that it allows you to accept all the parts of Cheryl Strayed — the character detours that are usually reserved for men in this “search for the self” type of role. She’s got faults, plenty of them, but she comes to accept them all, just as we do. It seems like a journey that all of us must take, at one time or another.

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B,” Strayed writes in her memoir. “It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.” 

People often do crazy things to figure out one basic thing: that they’re alive, and that they have every right to be amazed by that fact.