‘Wild’ Review: Reese Witherspoon gets 'Wild'
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There is a moment near the end of "Wild" where Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) runs into a young boy and his grandmother out on a weekend hike. Strayed has walked hundreds of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail in an attempt to deal with personal, emotional pain that has plagued her most of her young adult life. After learning of Strayed's heartbreaks the young boy (Evan O'Toole) sings her the song "Red River Valley." In the hands of a lesser director this scene could have been overly saccharine and misplaced. But director Jean-Marc Vallée makes it as artful and touching as it needs to be. Clearly, we should not have doubted him.
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| ‘Wild’ Review: Reese Witherspoon gets 'Wild' |
Vallée was one of the main creative forces of "Dallas Buyers Club," but did not earn a Best Director Oscar nod. Instead, he made due with an editing nomination. This was disheartening in some respects because there was not a public appearance that went by where the film's producers would not do everything possible to give him credit for making "Dallas" the artistic success it turned out to be. That film's storyline could have easily been shot as, for lack of a better description, an HBO movie. Instead, Vallée used the film's low budget means and superb performances to transform it into something that transcended its genre. In many ways, he does the same with "Wild."
- Wild Official Trailer #1
If you think about it, a movie that follows a hero on a gigantic trek is something you've probably seen before. It's the major conceit of the road trip genre. "Into the Wild," "The Straight Story," "The Darjeeling Limited" and "Broken Flowers" are some recent prestige examples (and Fox Searchlight's own "127 Hours" spent most of its screen time in the wilderness as well). Thanks to a powerhouse performance by Reese Witherspoon (more on that later), Vallée succeeds in avoiding those potential cliches again and again and again. It's no easy feat. And Nick Hornby, the "About a Boy" novelist and "An Education" screenwriter, delivers a screenplay which utilizes a flashback structure that easily could have gone off the rails, but doesn't.
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