Wild

Wild has a really intriguing premise, the idea of a solo hike does it for me but I was wary that the movie lasted over 100min. What could possibly be entertaining about a women hiking alone from the Mexican border to the Canadian Border? As it turns out quite a lot.

At first, it's hard to understand Cheryl, she definitely does not strike you as a someone who could do this. She bit off more than she can shew, it's clearly naive of her. But as Cheryl is struggling on her hike flashbacks of her life before the Pacific Crest Trails are peppered throughout the movie and like anyone you're getting to know she starts to make sense. You get to understand what she's been through, who she is, and what motivated her to do this. It's a challenge that she brought on herself for herself, something she needed.

And just like that a 115 minutes passes, during which you were taken on physical and soul searching journey with amazing landscapes, and a flawed but strong woman. Reese Witherspoon carries that film beautifully, she layered her performance with sensibility and a quiet strength that suited the character. I didn't totally relate to Cheryl but I wasn't completely impervious to her ordeal, I also have dreams and life-goals to achieve.

On a side note, it was recently pointed out to me I had never seen Wild as the female lead version of Into The Wild. I've never finished Sean Penn & Emile Hirsh's hiking movie but from what I remember Into The Wild was much more wild and raw the dude wasn't on a hiking trail but in the wilderness. These two movies only compare in the drives these two characters have to undertake their journey.

Wild is a beautiful movie about personal growth and living in one's truth. @wornoutspines

An arduous journey across America on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed tests her tenacity to continue forward till the end. There's very little else to the story, which makes this film really powerful. With not much else other than a tedious walk and a vampish past the story bobs back and forth between the present and the past revealing how Cheryl finds herself in such a circumstance and why she cant stop until she is finished.

At first Cheryl seems like a woman unable to let go of her now ex-husband, beginning a journey with more baggage than is necessary. It might almost be easy to throw this story into the bin of sappy chick-flicks when that inability to get closure on a relationships end is actually fronting as more of an act of remorse and regret. She messed up. And there is no way to repair the damage without an ugly scar.

The further she goes the more she dives into the series of events that lead her to such a devastating circumstance of sex and drugs. The loss of her mother is far too much for her to feel. The depth of such pain can sometimes strip a human being from feeling anything at all. The tears flow from her face but those tears are not falling for grief, they drop from the overwhelming numbing the death has caused.

Cheryl's emotions are lost in a wild and desolate space that is pain and grief, which is so perfectly mirrored with the vast, open landscape she is now physically wondering through. And both her emotions and the land are the same: it wont change immediately and things will be tough but if one keeps going forward one will come out of it. And better for it. Cheryl just needed that physical aspect to make the connection with her emotions. The self-loathing and destructive life she was living was the equivalence of her just lying down on the sandy path and dying right there.

It's a fairly event-less film where a woman just goes through some fairly tough terrain but somehow the flashes to her past spliced in with the turmoil of her present moves the story along swimmingly.

If you're a fan of deeply emotional story lines this one might very well be worth the watch.

Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern got well deserved Oscar nominations for their roles in this film. In fact, I cannot fathom how Witherspoon was denied a win.

I won't fall into the trap of comparing this film to the book. The book was the best one I read last year, and I thought it unfilmable. I was surprised at how well the film managed to capture the essential elements of the book.

The key was not the Pacific Coast Trail, but Cheryl Strayed's journey into self-discovery. The point where she fell to her knees in tears was the culmination of pain in her life, and the realization of her love for her mother.

This is definitely a film to watch more than once.

Realistic performance of Reese Witherspoon. An history about the life as it is. A movie to watch and review in your mind later. I like drama movies that you suffer as you are watching but give you things to think later, this is this type of movie. Wild is a one-character movie but the little pieces of the secondary characters are so well introduced that allows to introduce drama, fear, suspense and romanticism to the history. If I need to say something wrong about the movie is that in some passages there is lack of continuity and feels as if the movie was longer at the beginning and the director need to cut it to do it shorter.

Your life will most likely determine whether or not you like this film, whether or not it moves you.

I read the book and was not sure how they were going to make such an introspective novel into a movie but they did a pretty good job. My group of friends had mixed reactions, some of us were deeply moved (myself included) some where wondering why we were...

I felt the way her story was portrayed in flashbacks was very effective and about the only way to tell this story. It can never be as deep as the emotions in the book and it had to skim over a lot but still, for me and others I was with it was very powerful.

On a superficial side note... I wish she had looked dirtier. Her hair and clothes always looked too clean for what she was doing with very minimal hygiene.