Wild (2014)
★★★ — Wild (2014)
The best thing I can say about Wild is that Reese Witherspoon made me forget I was watching Reese Witherspoon. That's not a backhanded compliment. It's genuinely high praise. She plays Cheryl Strayed, a woman who has watched her life fall apart through grief, addiction and bad decisions, and who responds by strapping an enormous rucksack to her back and hiking over a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, more or less alone. Witherspoon is vulnerable, fierce, sometimes frightening to watch, and she commits completely. There's no vanity in it. It's the kind of performance that holds a film together even when the film around it wavers.
And Wild does waver, occasionally. Director Jean-Marc Vallée shoots it with natural light and a restless, fragmented structure, weaving together present-tense trail footage with memory flashes and voiceover, building up a portrait of Cheryl's life before the hike. The cinematography earns its keep. The wilderness looks both gorgeous and punishing, and you feel the blisters and the loneliness. The soundtrack does something interesting too, slipping into Cheryl's headspace rather than sitting politely under the action. All of that is genuinely good filmmaking.
Where I start to pull back a little is in how the film handles its emotional big swings. There are moments where the montages and flashback sequences pile up on each other, and the whole thing starts to feel slightly packaged, slightly biopic-by-numbers, when what it ought to feel is raw and messy and uncontainable. The story is raw and messy. Cheryl's grief, her mother's death, the spiral that followed, that's all real and it matters. But every now and then the film smooths the edges when it should leave them jagged.
I can't help bringing up Into the Wild, because it's one of my all-time favourite films and the comparison is unavoidable. Both are true stories about people heading into the wilderness to work something out about themselves and the world. But they're almost opposites in spirit. That film is mythic, poetic, almost spiritual, a young man walking away from society in search of some kind of truth. Wild is more grounded, more personal, more practical in a way. Cheryl isn't rejecting the world. She's trying to find her way back to it. Both are valid journeys. I just think one of them soars in a way the other doesn't quite manage.
Into the Wild has this quality of genuine wonder, a lyrical weight that makes the whole thing feel like it means something beyond the individual story. Wild is more contained, more focused on recovery than revelation, and that's fine, that's honest, but it means it doesn't linger in quite the same way. It's a very good film that stops just short of being a great one. If you've seen Beautiful Boy (2018), there's a similar dynamic at play: a story about the wreckage of addiction that's carried by its performances further than its structure sometimes deserves.
None of that should put you off watching it, though. Witherspoon's work here is reason enough, and there's real emotional honesty in how the film handles grief and self-destruction without ever making Cheryl into either a victim or a saint. She's a person who made a mess of things and is trying to walk her way back from it, one painful step at a time. That's enough of a story. It's a recovery, not a pilgrimage, and there's dignity in that.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2025-11-03
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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More with Reese Witherspoon: Walk the Line (2005)
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