Facing frailties the wild way
REECE Witherspoon gets impressively real in this film, happily dispelling the manufactured image she’s built up in comedies like Legally Blonde.
And director Jean-Marc Vallée follows up on last year’s Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club with another movie about a person faced with major physical and psychological challenges.
These frailties reside in a young woman, the appropriately named Cheryl Strayed (Witherspoon), whose life has gone off the rails after she loses the most important person in her life, her mother (a superb performance by Laura Dern). To dull the pain, Cheryl takes to heavy drugs and rough sex, much to the chagrin of her loving, exasperated husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski).
We learn all this in intricate flashback, as English novelist Nick Hornby’s nuanced script (based on Strayed’s 2012 memoir) gradually reveals her relationship with her mother through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, as well as her other travails.
The film’s present tense finds us in the company of Strayed as she begins a 1 600km odyssey on the Pacific Crest Trail that takes her from the US/Mexico border in California to the Bridge of the Gods in Oregon.
This is in the great Homeric tradition of epic journeys that are intended to find answers; the movie is visually spectacular as we follow Strayed’s initially halting progress, but ultimately it’s the inner landscape that proves the most interesting.
As already indicated, Strayed is not simply going for a walk; she’s in search of “the woman my mother thought I was”. It’s a reflection of the quality of Hornby’s script and Vallée’s direction that we don’t get any pat answers to Strayed’s mess of questions along the frequently tough and exhausting route.
We first learn that she’s a greenhorn backpacker. Strayed’s pack is way too heavy and there are some humorous moments at her expense as she struggles to stand up. There are also encounters with a rattlesnake, a couple of sinister rednecks, an amusing tractor driver and plenty of fellow backpackers who offer her good fellowship. As her often painful footslog continues, we frequently return to her relationship with her mother, which includes an episode where she finally leaves her abusive, alcoholic husband.
Witherspoon’s performance is a delicate thing. She’s trying to make sense of her messedup life, but there are no facile revelations or an ABC approach to her problems.
There are moments of deep emotion, but also a wry, philosophical approach to her issues. Does she regret everything she’s done? Well, not necessarily. It’s an insight that draws her closer to her mother and makes us warm to them both.