Witherspoon Treks Through the Winning Wild

For reasons that are perhaps understandable, stories about women finding themselves — or their voices, or their inner courage, or any number of things that are apparently very easy to mislay — are big business. But even if Cheryl Strayed’s hugely successful 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail fits the classic self-discovery template perfectly, it’s at least lively and entertaining. The book documents the author’s 1,100-mile trek up the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to Washington State — a trip she took alone in 1995, as a way of coping with her mother’s death and the fact that her own life had gone seriously off the rails. It works both as a highly descriptive piece of travel writing and a candid, and often funny, running interior monologue. As effortlessly likable as the book is, though, the chances of messing up the movie version were great: How do you dramatize a story that essentially consists of walking and thinking?

Jean-Marc Vallée pulls it off in Wild, in which Reese Witherspoon, as Strayed, faces down wilderness horrors like egg-frying heat, mountain passes clogged with snow, ill-fitting boots and tiny, slippery frogs that come out in droves at night. This woman-versus-nature battle is, of course, really a woman-versus-herself conflict in disguise. Although she’s joined by the occasional fellow traveler, the Strayed of Wild is mostly alone with the memories of her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), who died a few years earlier at age 45. In the time since, Strayed has done a marvelous job of messing up her life: She’s had a fling with heroin, and she’s still sorrowful over a failed marriage. Though she isn’t a particularly experienced hiker, Strayed somehow decides her best move is to fill up a backpack and head out into the cruel and beautiful natural world, a place where surely she’ll be able to find herself, or something. As she says in one of the movie’s many instances of introspective voice-over, “I’m gonna walk my way back to the woman my mother thought I was.”

That kind of signpost language is best used sparingly, and thankfully, Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby keep it to a minimum. Mostly, they show us this half-bumpy, half-glorious journey through Strayed’s eyes, and their vision is by and large faithful to her book. Both the book and the movie open with Strayed mid-hike, having just scaled a challenging ridge. She stops to rest at the top and removes her boots, revealing bloodied socks beneath — she has learned, too late, that her footgear is a size too small. Still, it’s better than nothing, which is what she has after her backpack topples, sending one boot bouncing down the steep hillside. She throws its mate after it, screaming with rage: She’s furious at her stupid boots, but even more furious at the stupid universe for taking her mother away.

Vallée knows how to transform that futile fury into a kind of dramatic energy; the movie, like its heroine, is always moving forward, pausing occasionally for a reflective flashback. Strayed recalls her life with her now ex-husband (Thomas Sadoski) and relives their parting in an excruciating whisper of detail. She thinks back on her mother, who raised her and her brother (Keene McRae) alone after finally getting the courage to leave her abusive husband, the children’s father. Dern is a wonderfully sympathetic presence in those scenes.

Both the material and the setting seem to have shaken something loose in Witherspoon. She’s moved further away from those uptight, humorless romantic-comedy cuties she played in the mid 2000s and more toward the breezy, blunt, self-determined characters of her early career.

As Strayed, Witherspoon — sometimes a wonderful actress and sometimes a maddening one — has found herself.