The Pacific Crest Trail runs through California from Mexico to Canada. In 1995, in the wake of her mother's death from cancer, Cheryl Strayed walked 1,100 miles of the route. Her best-selling memoir, Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found, offers a roadmap for Jean-Marc Vallée's adaptation, a tough road movie that skirts around most of the book's life-lesson psychodramas.
Reese Witherspoon plays Cheryl. Her mum's death has prompted a crisis. She dabbles with heroin and courts sex from strangers. Her ex-husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski) doesn't know how to help her. Grief has revolutionised her in the worst possible way. It'll take something monumental to bring her back. Something like a 1,100-mile hike through the wilderness.
The premise sounds corny, but Vallée, in collaboration with screenwriter Nick Hornby, gives the film its energy by pulling the narrative apart. They create a two-hour hallucinatory montage of the hike and Cheryl's back story that's wound together with the songs, phrases and poetry that she recited to herself as she walked. At one point Cheryl is ticked off by an experienced hiker for carrying too much gear. He takes apart her monster backpack, and pulls out everything that's superfluous. Hornby's script does the same thing. It strips the book of the extra weight.
Vallée, who helped Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto to Oscar wins with Dallas Buyer's Club last year, retains his cinematographer, Yves Bélanger, and editor, Martin Pensa, from that film. They capture perfectly the experience of the cyclical, repetitive nature of enduring an experience. The film, which was pushed through development by Witherspoon, feels at times like a journey taken by a Kelly Reichardt character, not the passion project of an mainstream star.
There are a couple of stones in the shoe. Laura Dern, who plays Cheryl's mum, isn't given much scope to develop her part before her character dies. Gaby Hoffmann, again playing the responsible friend dragging a mate back from the brink, is under-used. Still, the film – like the story – is very much a solo journey. The people Cheryl meets (a friendly trio of college dudes, a sinister pair of hunters quick to objectify a solo female hiker) are almost incidental.
Where Strayed's book tended to wander into self-pity, Hornby presents a much tougher version of the character. Cheryl pulls her giant backpack on and grunts and puffs along the trail, she stops to pull out loose toe nails from feet ruined by her boots. She falls asleep by a pond and wakes up covered in tiny frogs. Cheryl in the book freaks out, Cheryl in the film is fascinated. Vallée, Bélanger and Pensa enjoy the bestial details of the adventure, but they don't exploit them, shooting sparingly and cutting away before anything gets rote.
Wild feels like a real journey, even if Cheryl's physical location becomes unclear in the flurry of half-recollection. Travelogues, from Eat Pray Love to last month's similarly dim-witted Hector and the Search for Happiness, tend to espouse the theory that the world is there for our entertainment. Vallée's film suggests we're merely a small part of it.
• Comments have been reopened to time with this film's Australian release
