From lost to found

In a way, Jean-Marc Vallée’s film version of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of her transformative adventure in the wilderness is a companion piece, and lively foil, to his previous film, Dallas Buyers Club.

The new film’s Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) is more subdued and contemplative than the flamboyant Buyer’s Club characters played by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, but she has some of the same recklessness and brash desperation. And while Wild has no real counterpart to the Leto character, it does have Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother, a charmingly erratic figure who both haunts and fuels her daughter’s dreams.

Witherspoon delivers a tough, smart performance in what for her is a somewhat atypical role. The film holds her star power at something like arm’s length and builds a close-up sense of its protagonist through a combination of cinematic elements, including flashes of a kind of stream-of-consciousness editing.

Even in the occasional emotional eruption, Witherspoon maintains a calm intensity, and Vallée’s film matches that with the cool, rough beauty of its cinematography. Here the central characterization is a matter not only of what she says and does and sees, but also of the tentatively implied insights of those memory flashes and other fleeting associations.

Much of the film is a straight-ahead account of the physical challenges of Cheryl’s arduous journey, with her spiritual revitalization portrayed partly through the cumulative effect of small, quietly telling moments and partly through deceptively casual gradations in Witherspoon’s performance.

A particularly striking example of the latter comes by way of Cheryl’s brief encounter with a fox. Witherspoon’s wordless reaction to the fox suggests a moment of “wild” recognition, and Vallée uses a couple of remarkable close-ups to suggest some kind of kinship between the woman and the fox. Nothing ever gets said out loud about this encounter, but the fox reappears along the trail a couple of times as Cheryl reaches the final fulfilling stages of her wilderness journey.

Most of the drama in Wild gets expressed in that kind of sidelong fashion. The film seems averse to big dramatic moments, more or less as a matter of principle. It becomes part of the point that even the trailside encounters that threaten to turn nasty or scary fizzle down to the level of everyday nuisances.

Even the one gesture toward a climactic “big moment”—a child’s a cappella rendering of “Red River Valley” near the end of Cheryl’s trek—is handled in an emotionally complex way that leaves conventional movie sentiment far behind.