Review

Wild

The thing is, Reese Witherspoon was always a gifted actress. Back before she made Legally Blonde in 2001 and briefly got tagged with the dreaded "America's sweetheart" label, she was making intriguing, thought-provoking stuff (Election, Pleasantville), even into the aggressively disturbing.

Watching her in Matthew Bright's unheralded-but-fascinating Freeway, playing a kind of mutant, southern Little Red Riding Hood to Kiefer Sutherland's deranged, pedophile "wolf," you got to see some of the depths of the volcanic raw emotion that powered her best performances. Her sweet-faced look and careful Southern charm belied a churning, raw emotional core that consistently surprised you in its clarity and forcefulness. Like Regan MacNeil, the little girl from The Exorcist, only this time possessed by emotional potency rather than a demon from hell.

Wild

Grade: 88

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Thomas Sadoski, Laura Dern, Gaby Hoffmann

Director: Jean-Marc Vallee

Rating: R, for sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language

Running time: 115 minutes

All of which she intentionally toned way, way down for Blonde and the subsequent run of dopey romantic comedies that made up the majority of her immediate stardom in the early aughts. But much like another, similarly heralded Southern actor whose recent spate of serious films has catapulted him back into the upper echelon of movie stardom -- and naturally I speak here of Matthew McConaughey -- it seems as if the time is right for Witherspoon to get back to the business of proving her stardom with singularly devastating performances.

Acutely coincidental, then, that the director of her new film, concerning a lost soul who goes on an epic 1,100- mile hiking journey to find herself again, was directed by Canadian Jean Marc-Vallee, the same man who made last year's McConaughey-led star vehicle Dallas Buyers Club. This film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, heralded by the Canadian press leading the charge for their local boy made good, became not just a validation of Vallee's sophisticated filmmaking, but also a prime vehicle to remind us all just how good Witherspoon can be when she's given properly challenging material.

Significantly, the best part of her work in the film, based on a memoir by Cheryl Strayed, is her restraint, made all the more powerful by the nature of Vallee's peripatetic storytelling techniques. As a soul-searching travelogue, the film is anything but plot-driven -- a damaged woman starts near the Mexican border and over the course of the next several months, hikes the Pacific Coast Trail all the way up to Canada -- and rather than stud the story with telltale character markers and obvious plot devices, cluttering its ephemeral appeal with unnecessary noise and intentional misdirection, Vallee, working from an excellent script by Nick Hornby, instead keeps us very much in Cheryl's head.

She's nursing a wealth of pain, from losing her effervescent mother (Laura Dern) to cancer, to letting her marriage fall apart amid a resultant self-hating splurge of hard-drugs and wanton, emotionless sex with strangers.

She is a woman with a holy mission ("I'm going to walk myself back to the woman my mother thought I was") and Vallee sagely doesn't stray very far from his protagonist's consciousness: When she meets people along the way -- a fellow lone female traveller, a pair of creepy bowhunters, a small group of college-age friends who are clearly driving each other bonkers on their extended time together -- they flit in and out of the film gracefully, banished to her memory along with the dissolution of her marriage to the caring Paul (Thomas Sadoski, much less annoying not having to speak in Aaron Sorkin gibberish), the random men she slept with, the drugs she snorted and injected with reckless abandon, and the mother who left her far too early. All of these elements, along with certain recurring musical cues (Simon & Garfunkel make up a good deal of the slightly subverted soundtrack), and her thoughts, looping in the echo chamber of her head, make up a good deal of the tension and character development of the story.

Like John Curran's Tracks, released earlier this year, which starred Mia Wasikowska as real-life adventurer Robyn Davidson, who made a 1,700-mile pilgrimage across the Australian outback as a 20-something in the late '70s, Vallee's film is less about his protagonist's life outside the natural world, and more about the inverted nature of her solitude, and what she eventually finds there. Neither film panders to our base narrative cravings, pushing a plot-heavy agenda on material that, like an unperturbed, leaf-strewn pond, or a distant jagged peak, is content enough to just be there in the first place.

The trick, of course, is to keep it compelling nonetheless, and this is where Witherspoon, whose face is a captivating amalgamation of emotional depths, absolutely shines. She plays Strayed perfectly straight, a good-enough woman dealing with a cruel circus of pain that she was unable to contain in the framework of her previous life. She approaches strangers she meets with a jovial openheartedness that we hope and pray isn't used against her (and to this end, Vallee makes tidy use of our concern to provoke us with several characters who could be insidious or otherwise), and we want her to succeed in whatever it is she hopes to accomplish out on the trail, however she manages to get there.

In the end, the film ends with her validation, of course, as these films (and memoirs, for that matter) so often do, but the journey is the thing that tugs at us. We can suffer with her through the tumultuous perils of the trek, and wince as she reveals the bruises and raw, reddened patches of skin that have been stripped off by her enormously heavy backpack, but we can also envy the purity of her experience: She went off on a quest to cleanse her psyche of her immediate past, and under the blanket of stars up the West Coast, she performed her own kind of exorcism -- appropriately enough, given the actress playing her to the hilt -- her holy water coming pumped through a reverse-osmosis filtration system, and struck safe with cleansing iodine pills. We should all be so lucky.

MovieStyle on 12/19/2014

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