WASHINGTON — She played Matthew McConaughey’s outlaw lover, Juniper, last year in the indie flick “Mud.”
But while McConaughey rode the Oscar wave with “Dallas Buyers Club,” Witherspoon was busy swimming out
from under the negative publicity of a 2013 DUI arrest, all caught on camera.
Cameras have immense power. But so do celebrity comebacks. Especially with an actress with such obvious
talent as Witherspoon, who has just set herself free to enjoy endless future possibilities.
It’s only fitting that Witherspoon’s career resurgence be staged by the very man who catapulted the
McConaissance, “Dallas Buyers Club” director Jean-Marc Vallée. He may have given McConaughey the Oscar
wings to rocket past Jupiter, but with Witherspoon, it’s Juniper Ascending. She’s officially a lock for a Best
Actress nomination.
“Wild” casts her as Cheryl Strayed, an aptly named drifter who sets out on a demanding 1,100-mile hike along
the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, trekking the length of the U.S. west coast, from Mexico to Canada.
There’s no gold medal at the end of the line, no Guinness World Record. The light at the end of the tunnel is
simply a chance to slay personal demons and come to terms with her own troubled past, involving her mother
(Laura Dern) and boyfriend (Michiel Huisman).
It’s hard to call it a career performance — part of us will always think of her as Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde”
(2001). We also associate her “greatness” with her Oscar-winning turn as June Carter Cash in “Walk the Line”
(2008). But “Wild” is easily her best performance since she took that Oscar stage.
It’s quite the feat, considering most of the movie is simply us watching her determined face and tormented
eyes. With POV shots and the panting voiceover of her internal monologue, we the viewers enter her too-tight
boots and imagine them scrunching into our own toenails. We laugh with her as she tries to hoist her
“Monster” backpack onto her back. We gasp with her as she encounters strangers, of the human and animal
variety, unsure whether their motives reek of predators, such as in “Deliverance” (1972), or watchdog
guardians, such as in “Dances with Wolves” (1990).
And yet, leaving the theater, the performance most burned into your brain might be the same one that haunts
Cheryl — Dern’s single mother. While her own father, Bruce Dern, won praise last year as the cranky dad in
“Nebraska” (2013), Dern delivers the opposite, with an optimistic warmth despite every reason to be jaded.
She combines the motherly instincts of her role in “Jurassic Park” (1993) with her urge to find the beauty
beneath mankind’s sinister nature in “Blue Velvet” (1986).
In that movie, she looked for hopeful robins as a counter to Dennis Hopper’s monster. In “Wild,” she insists on
bringing her kids out to the front porch each day to watch the sunrise. There’s even a hint of Hopper’s “Easy
Rider” (1969), with a similar free-spirited tone and acid-trip cutting style.
Rarely does a movie title so perfectly match its filmmaker. If Renoir invented “The Rules of the
Game” and Godard left us “Breathless,” Vallée’s style is most certainly “Wild.”
He daringly intercuts the surface-level hike with striking subtext, ranging from surrealist hallucinations to
haunting flashback memories, which gradually reveal the backstory rather than telling it all in one
straightforward chunk. The result is the feel of a mystery — not a whodunnit pot-boiler, but a mystery about
our main character’s emotional makeup.
More than just a visual innovator, Vallée is developing quite the reputation of working with actors, coaching
both McConaughey and Jared Leto to Oscars in “Dallas Buyers Club.” In “Wild,” he once again gets
performances that are raw, gritty and real. And if these characters feel like real people with real problems, it’s
because they are.
The film is based on a 2012 memoir by the real Cheryl Strayed. It reached No. 1 on The New York Times Best-
Seller List after appearing on Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. But rather than a cheesy Hallmark card or melodramatic
Lifetime movie, the film carries a rare authenticity in its character study. Much of the credit belongs to
screenwriter Nick Hornby, who penned “High Fidelity” (2000) and “About a Boy” (2002) before earning an
Oscar nomination for “An Education” (2009). He very well could earn another one here in
the Adapted Screenplay category.
By no means is it a perfect script. Occasionally, its presentation over-relies on voiceover narration, while its
story structure leaves us wanting to know more about the peripheral characters. Strayed’s boyfriend leaves
encouraging letters for her along the trail, but we never quite feel like we know him.
Such flaws are minor in a work this focused on its central character’s journey. It’s a riveting work that never
fails to subvert our expectations, jar us with daring imagery and move us with clever analogies. It’s no
coincidence that Cheryl sheds her baggage and burns the pages of her books as she moves further down the
trail, leaving a Mojave Desert of painful memories in her rearview.
This is no vacation. This is purgation.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
The above rating is based on a 4-star scale. See where this film ranks in
Jason’s Fraley Film Guide. Follow WTOP Film Critic Jason Fraley on Twitter @JFrayWTOP, read his blog The Film Spectrum, listen Friday
mornings on 103.5 FM and see a full list of his stories on our “Fraley on Film” page.
