Wild Review: Witherspoon's Performance Can't Sustain the Story

Jean-Marc Vallée's Wild gets lost along the trail.

Review by Matt Cummings

Director Jean-Marc Vallée stunned us in 2013 with Dallas Buyer's Club, a story about a man's personal journey into the Hell of AIDS in the 1980's. He returns in 2014 with Wild, a movie bolstered by Reese Witherspoon's terrific performance and a script that can't keep up with her.

In 1995, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) made the impetuous choice to walk the entire length of Pacific Crest Trail alone. Suffering from a series of personal tragedies including the death of her well-intentioned but lost mother (Laura Dern), Strayed spiraled into a world of drugs and trampish behavior before finding herself divorced and on the edge of a mental breakdown. Desperate to rediscover herself, Cheryl sets out on her 150-day odyssey, determined but impossibly inexperienced, encountering danger, starvation, and perhaps her former self along the way.

Witherspoon locks into her character early and never lets go, with determined, hollow glances as she struggles to both complete the trek and figure out why she did it in the first place. She's past the glitzy but empty comedies of her early career (still gotta love her in Friends with that vinyl dress) and has entered 'the nude zone' with several rather revealing scenes that have become the blueprint for winning an Oscar (thanks, Gweneth Paltrow). But while her performance might just nab her the golden statue, it's unlikely that Vallée will do the same. Wild jumps around too much through Cheryl's past, often re-displaying memories that feel more random than connected to Writer Nick Hornby's script. The ending breezes in and out far too quickly, summarizing the next seven years after she completed the trek, with payoff to the audience. Again, great films show us the payoff, and Vallée struggles to bring his film to a conclusion, like he himself is as exhausted by the affair as Cheryl.

Performances throughout are mixed, from the very good (Dern) to the serviceable (Cheryl's husband, played by Thomas Sadoski). Vallée paints several pretty outdoor shots but fails to put Witherspoon among them in a way that connects her to the incredible environments she encounters. Say what you want about The Hobbit, but Peter Jackson always showed us how small humans were in nature's bigger picture. Wild is all 'journey you take rather than the destination' and that doesn't work as well as it could. We're treated to a frankly overwhelming amount of flashbacks, each seemingly added to evoke some emotion from the audience. Some of them work very well, such as those surrounding the death of Cheryl's mother and her descent into heroin. But these two journeys don't feel connected: none of it ever returns to play a role along the trail, and while we're meant to see just how messed up her life was, Vallée doesn't make as convincing an argument as he could.

Wild serves as yet another example of the 2014 Oscar season: strong performances surrounded by scripts that can't keep up. This one serves up two guaranteed nominations - perhaps based more on the political game of 'for your consideration' than any actual value - but Vallée's film is two steps behind Dallas Buyer's Club and stuck in a snowstorm to boot. Once again, I'd say 'See it for the performances, not the film.'

Wild is rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language and has a runtime of 115 minutes.

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