Wild

Last year I reviewed the Aussie film Tracks, a film about a girl with a rough background walking across the desert. This week I watched Wild, a film about a girl with a rough background walking the Pacific Crest Trail, a hike that goes from Mexico to Canada. Like with Tracks, Jean-Marc Vallée's latest film didn't really inspire me the way these films are supposed to.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) is a wreck after the death of her mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) and divorces her husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski) after he finds that she's cheated on him. To get her life back on track, Cheryl decides to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. Along the way she meets a fair few people who she relates to, as well as some unsavoury characters who just want to use her.

While I appreciate the film's overall message (despite it not doing anything to me), I feel like Vallée's filmmaking is all over the place here. The structure and editing don't do much help make sense of the story. Non-linear films can be fun to watch and sometimes they can give backstory to characters, as is the intention with this film. However, the flashbacks that we do see are very fragmented and brief, giving only a cursory insight to Cheryl's motivations and thus not making her a very endearing character.

The film suffers from an overabundance of narration. Scenes where we should read into Witherspoon's performance are interrupted by obvious narration of what's going on in her mind. The film's epilogue is also rushed along with a solid minute monologue at the end of the film, felt like something a teenager would write at the end of a story to let the reader know that everything would be okay. This could have been cut out entirely and given time for the audience to breathe and come to their own conclusions on whether Cheryl achieved her redemption.

Thematically the film is very much on the nose, holding hands with the audience the entire time. Such is the nature of a poorly done CGI fox who represents the soul of her mother and you know this from the moment you see it. Also, whilst I am not one of those hideous men's rights people and I fully support feminist films (and this is a great example of one, up there perhaps with Jackie Brown), every man, bar her brother and ex-husband, comes across like they wish to take advantage of Cheryl and I truly was scared for her at times. I don't feel like this needed to happen every time to remind the audience that there is that fear that Cheryl carries with her.

With this being a film with a lone main character, I had expected to see Witherspoon for the entire film. She gives a superb performance, something I haven't seen her do since Pleasantville. The fact that there are too little supporting roles, or if there are, they aren't in it for long, that irked me a little. Laura Dern comes back time and time again in the flashbacks, but I didn't feel a strong connection to her. Thomas Sadoski and Gaby Hoffman, who plays Cheryl's friend, both get a pitiful amount of screen time and I would have loved to see a lot more of W. Earl Brown.

Jean-Marc Vallée is capable of making better movies as we saw with Dallas Buyers Club and I know that all the actors can do better than this and despite this movie having some Oscar nominations based on it's strong female characters, it isn't a too exciting movie.