Movie Review: Wild (2014)

The Philadactyl reviews Wild

Cheryl's life is ruined, and she has decided that in order to pull herself together she's going to walk herself straight by hiking over a thousand miles along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). She begins with little experience if not none, and over the course of the movie she makes peace with her past so that she can move forward with her life. This synopsis could be implemented into a riveting adventure story about man vs the wild and how Cheryl gains and implements experience into her travels through nature. It could start with her being afraid, lonely, tired, and making some foolish mistakes, but show through various scenarios over the course of several months how she learns to survive, becomes effective at it, and becomes comfortable with her surroundings and way of life while on the trail. Such a story should be about transformation, but alas 2014's Wild starring Reese Witherspoon clearly has very little idea of how to do just that.

The opening scene of the movie tries to draw the audience in, and almost succeeds to do so, with Cheryl climbing to the top of a mountain to dress a particularly nasty wound involving her big toe. In doing so, she accidentally knocks her boot, the one piece of gear that would protect her wound from her harsh surroundings, down the mountain. It keeps rolling and rolling as Cheryl watches in disbelief. This clearly, is not one of Cheryl's most pleasant moments, and it truly tests her. The audience is left to wonder just how Cheryl got into this conundrum, and how will she handle it to overcome it? Any immersion which this dramatic opening scene had on the audience is instantly broken as Cheryl stands up, throws her other boot down the mountain, and emotionally yells, “Fuck you!” Good job, Cheryl, now you have no shoes out in the wilderness. Oh yeah, that's right, we're watching something that's fake, something that Hollywood made. I'm sitting in a movie theatre, because if I was in Cheryl's situation, even if I was emotionally wrecked and I felt helpless, I wouldn't do anything to intentionally make my situation worse. Maybe my actions might unintentionally make things worse, especially if my nerves were shot, or I might give up for a while, but out in the wilderness, where you can only help yourself, you would never knowingly do something to make things worse. The melodrama that Cheryl engaged in is equivalent to angrily destroying your phone by throwing it at a wall. Sure, it's a huge inconvenience to yourself, and thus a valid expression of frustration, but it isn't life endangering.

This opening scene provides the model for the rest of the movie. That scene isn't returned to. By the end of the movie, we still have no idea what point in her adventure she was at when she had climbed that mountain, how she got hurt, or how she moved own without any shoes. Due to the shameless and painful plug they have later in the movie, I suppose it can be assumed that REI dropped off a new pair for her by helicopter.

Cheryl's hike is then shown in chronological order, but nothing really happens. There are plenty of situations which would have to be addressed throughout the course of hiking a thousand miles across various terrains out in the wild, but the movie almost never touches on it. Instead, it focuses on why Cheryl is hiking the PCT in the first place, and thus the movie gets sucked into a black hole from which there is no redemption.

During the course of Cheryl's hike, the movie is constantly cut with scenes from her past, which are jam packed with generic cheesy drama. I understand that the movie tried to explain why Cheryl would do something so dramatic as to go out and hike a thousand miles through the wilderness, but it went over the top with it and threw too much emphasis on it. We get it, she had a messed up life; you could have shown us this in a brief fifteen minute scene if you really wanted to show us.

That brings up another point – why show us her past at all? There were plenty of situations throughout the movie during which Cheryl could have talked about it with the various characters she encountered on her adventure, and she did a little, but the movie mostly relied on actually showing us scenes from her past. She even got interviewed at one point by someone writing for the “Hobo Times.” The scene was one of the few successfully comical moments in the film, but it lacked the potential to shift focus from Cheryl's past to her current adventure by exposing her past in a modern sense.

Instead, for half the movie we got a series of discombobulated flashbacks which were just scenes inserting unnecessary drama and/or sex. They weren't even chronological, and often times didn't really relate to anything the Cheryl was doing out in the wild. They were just there for the sake of tugging at the emotional strings of the audience by quickly triggering them with one extreme social situation before jumping on to another one. A brief list of scenes used to do this involve an abusive alcoholic father, drama over her mother being in the same school as her, an asshole brother who may have been mentally retarded that got in the way of his mother bettering herself, distanced himself from her, and didn't get to reveal how much his mother meant to him before she died unexpectedly of cancer, Cheryl cheating a lot on her husband and as a result getting pregnant by an unknown father, getting divorced, using drugs, getting robbed, and even a guilt scene about shooting a horse (although this last one kind of tied into her getting in touch with nature, but by this time in the movie flashbacks came off as cheap and empty). While these scenes could arguably be there to provide back story, due to their over the top nature and multitude they lacked any substance. Instead of building character they ironically took away from being able to show Cheryl's transformation along the trail which would have developed her character on its own.

This technique of relying on drama for cheap emotional triggers even permeated its way into the hike scenes by means of rape fear. There are at least three scenes during which Cheryl, despite having been established as a very promiscuous woman (she even brought an entire roll of condoms with her), is scared of being raped during her encounters with strangers. None of those strangers ever made a physical move on her, and those scenes came off as quite unnecessary. While they revealed Cheryl's insecurity, once would have been enough to do that, especially since half the time said strangers actually helped her on her way. This might be a minor thing to complain about, but in the context of all the other unnecessary drama the movie throws at you, it's that cherry on top of a pile of excrement.

The half of the movie focusing on Cheryl's actual hike is decent, but it doesn't shine, mostly due to how little focus it has. Character transformation isn't fluid, making jumps here and there. During an early scene Cheryl is inside of her tent scared by the noises she hears outside. Very soon after she's howling with coyotes she hears in the distance. Out of nowhere she suddenly gets over her ex. The list goes on. Obviously, it would have been very difficult to show such transformation because of how little screen time Cheryl's actual hike was given, and that is the central flaw to this film.

The movie doesn't really show her struggling with nature outside of a small scene here or there. A lot of the hiking scenes involve her during her breaks at campgrounds and even at a town. Most of the conversations and events during those scenes are shallow, pointless, and confusing since Cheryl's character is radically different there than during her flashbacks. Before her hike she is shown as somebody who is outspoken and does her own thing to the point of confidently engaging in reckless and self-destructive behavior. Out in the campgrounds and wild she is quite timid. I suppose it can be claimed that the hike transformed her, but that transformation wasn't ever shown. Nobody gets to see why she turned out that way.

My main gripe with the movie is that it didn't really show Cheryl tackling nature. It didn't show her struggling to learn the most basic of survival skills such as making a fire, making inexperienced mistakes, and then learning from them. Such experiences, and scenes depicting them, should have been central to showing Cheryl's transformation. Instead, the closest the movie comes to this is a scene where Cheryl buys the wrong type of fuel for her stove, a scene where she trims down her pack so that it's not as heavy, and a scene using iodine tablets to purify some water from a puddle she found. Notice that all those scenes involve her dealing with gear, not nature (although to give the movie credit, Cheryl does get swept away a little by a river). She was relying on finite resources to survive rather than bending nature to her needs. Hell, at the end of the movie she burns the pages of a book by themselves without using them as kindling to start a proper campfire. Good job, Cheryl, that fire lasted you fifteen minutes at most. Now what are you going to do?

Like all of her life decisions, her conclusions came out of nowhere and the movie was over. I will say that I did buy what she had to say at the end of the movie, about how she accepted her past rather than regret it since she had learned from it. It was a realistic conclusion, but the ending was rather abrupt. There wasn't really any indication that Cheryl was reaching her destination, physically or internally. She came to a sign before a bridge and went into a monologue. Some post script about how she eventually found a new man and had a child with him was shoved down the audience's throat and the credits rolled. At the end of a movie about a journey, I didn't feel like I had gone anywhere.

Wild is a drama film trying to disguise itself as an adventure film about inner and outer exploration. It doesn't really know what it wants to do, and this ultimately becomes as self-destructive as the protagonist's past. Although it's clear that the filmmakers wanted to take the audience on a journey of reconciliation and transformation that only prolonged exposure to the wild outdoors can do, it failed to actually do so since there isn't really any journey between the beginning and the end, and it got so tangled up in it's own back story that the conclusion is abrupt and empty.