CINEMANIA:

Wild (USA, 2014,Jean-Marc Vallée )

Ben Livant:

For a story supposedly about being out in the world, the wild world at that, Wild pays very little attention to the great outdoors. The natural environment is merely instrumental to the personal journey taken by the protagonist to find herself.

It would be easy to criticize this instrumentality for failing to be, or even worse, for preventing environmentalism. Such a critique might run as follows.

However seemingly benign - after all, she takes nothing but photographs and leaves nothing but footprints - the heroine does not commune with nature. She does not bond with the animals and plants and rocks. She does not through empathy unite with The Other. She exploits it emotionally, uses it as so much empty space to traverse, triumphs over it as the void of civilization and in so doing returns to her civilized personality.

For her grief after losing her mother to cancer had made her so uncivilized. Sex with strangers in alleys. Shooting up smack. Self-destructively destroying her marriage in the process. Oh, she was a wild one alright. So she signed up for Boot Camp 101 For One and came out at the end at peace with herself, ready to love again. This is some nice auto-psychotherapy, to be sure, especially attractive to the middle-class budget. Not exactly a primer in ecological consciousness, though.

Yeah, so that's how that critique might run. What about the feminism in Wild? Does this not trump that critique? Perhaps it does. Women are not supposed to shirk their domestic duties. Go ahead and have a career, make a lot of money while you're at it, but have supper on the table and all that. The home-maker must - at the end of the day - be at home. The protagonist in Wild does not go on a temporary adventure, she seriously splits the scene man. Frankly, had she abandoned some kids, at least half the audience would have found it difficult to root for her. The point is, she steps out individualistically, as so many men have been applauded for doing, so bully for her.

Along this line, I can understand how Wild would be received by many folks as very inspirational, women in particular, young women especially. Don't forget, it is based on a memoir, so the author represents a kind of self-help role model. Reese Witherspoon in the film role of the role model is solid. She strikes the right balance between being desperate enough to embark on the experience and resilient enough to endure it. She ultimately sings along with Gloria Gaynor, as it were, "I will survive," and she does.

The redemption on offer in Wild is as good as it gets without joining a church. Fair enough. But maybe throw in a bit of pantheism next time for us tree-huggers.

Dan Jardine:

Based on my scant knowledge of the story and the filmmakers involved I expected to dislike Wild. Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée made the Oscar baity Dallas Buyers Club, which left me all “meh” while I have been lukewarm on the work of Reese Witherspoon for at least a decade. The trailer made the film look like a watered down, distaff version of the terrific Into the Wild, which few films of this ilk can measure up to.

So it is with some surprise that I must confess that I liked Wild. Not only more than I expected, and certainly more than Dallas Buyers Club, but on its own merits. The film is a solid entertainment that treats the central story of redemption with honesty, rarely resorting to cinematic cliche as shortcut, but trusting the material and--the key to the film’s overall success--the solid work of Reese Witherspoon, who puts aside her image as a Hollywood angel of sorts in order to dig deeply and painfully into the emotional trauma of the well-named Cheryl Strayed and deliver his best performance since Walk the Line.

Her work here isn’t risky simply because Witherspoon bares it all, on both literal and metaphorical levels, but because her character is, for the vast majority of the film, distinctly unlikeable. Cheryl is foolishly ill-prepared for her trauma-healing quest, and treats pretty much everyone (including herself and those who are trying to help her) very shabbily. For much of the trek, Witherspoon’s character doesn’t give us much to pull for. But, root we do, largely due to the efforts of Witherspoon, whose raw honesty allows us to hang in there, even during the most challenging moments in her character’s arc.

As for Vallée as a director, I cannot say that there is much here to distinguish this film from its antecedent. As with DBC, which was likewise anchored by a stellar central performance that largely overshadowed the rest of the film, Vallée seems content taking a largely uncinematic “tv movie of the week” approach to his material, while allowing his leads to reap the awards. This should allow him to have a comfortable career in Hollywood as an "actor's director" and if that is the limit of his ambitions, more power to him, I guess.

Then Ben:

Thank you for providing some genuinely appreciative balance to my somewhat cynical review. I mean this sincerely because I believe what you say is correct. I experienced Wild in much the way you did and I failed to make this clear in jumping directly to the possible thematic ramifications of the movie. This is not to retract my previous considerations, however, and you bringing up Into TheWild prompts me to elaborate on the ecological issue further. Into The Wild is a serious wake-up call for anyone with even an ounce of Romanticism about re-connecting with Nature as the solution to the problem of being disconnected with civilization. The protagonist's naivety regarding the reality of what is required for human survival in the wilderness is heartbreaking in the extreme. In this truly tragic tale, the Otherness of the non-human world is confirmed in no uncertain terms. Regardless of whether this antithesis to the likes of Snow White is mostly right or mostly wrong, the point is that the wildness is genuinely present - has a speaking part, so to speak - in Into The Wild, whereas it is thoroughly absent in Wild.