OK, I don’t believe Witherspoon would ever reek so horribly. Southern gals like her glow, don’t you know. Yet she is still youthful enough at 38, looking as if she is ready for high-school gym class in her hiking shorts and T-shirt, that she easily pulls off portraying a 26-year-old. In fact, she hasn’t been so unguarded and emotionally open onscreen since her captivating film debut as a young teen in love in 1991’s “The Man in the Moon.” Just as director Jean-Marc Vallee brought out the best in Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in last year’s “Dallas Buyers Club,” he mostly does right by Witherspoon.
As for life-threatening hazards, they mainly exist in her head as flickers of old memories grow into full-blown flashback sequences. I was less convinced by these visits to the past where we see Strayed lose her bearings after her adored mother dies from a virulent bout of cancer at 45. (Laura Dern, only nine years older than Witherspoon, manages to be quite fabulous as Bobbi, a human sunbeam who radiates unconditional love for her children after leaving behind an abusive marriage.)
Overwhelmed by grief, Strayed engages in reckless sex with strangers and picks up a heroin addiction while destroying her marriage to a rather sweet and caring husband. Witherspoon tries, even doing her first-ever nude scenes, to convince us she has hit the skids. Yet no matter how greasy her hair or how dead her eyes, I just can’t buy her as a self-destructive junkie.
Thankfully, “Wild” only suffers somewhat from this disconnect. It is engaging enough to follow Strayed on her journey, one that she dedicates to Bobbi. Her mission statement: “I’m going to walk myself back to the woman my mother thought I was.” I enjoyed her literary-inspired scribbles left behind at various signposts, starting with this quotation from Emily Dickinson: “If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve.” Some of the soundtrack tunes are obvious—particularly Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa” and “Homeward Bound”—but they are leavened with snippets of Lucinda Williams, Portishead and even some highly appropriate Grateful Dead.
Ultimately, I decided to forgive most of the hints of miscasting after being brought to tears by an unexpectedly beautiful moment provided by a young boy strolling the trail with his grandmother as he serenades Strayed with a heartbreaking rendition of “Red River Valley.” Even when “Wild” occasionally stumbles, it gets back on track with relative ease.
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