When Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education) read Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir about a 1,100-mile journey of self-discovery, Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found he wrote, ‘One of the best books I’ve read in the last five or ten years…Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it’s destined to be a loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time’.
Cut to 2014: with Hornby’s screenplay, Jean-Marc Vallee’s (C.R.A.Z.Y., Dallas Buyers Club) direction and Reese Witherspoon cast as Cheryl Strayed, the film reads like Oscar 2015 buzz right there.
Witherspoon transforms herself as a freshly divorced and emotionally raw Cheryl who undertakes a solo marathon hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, and is matched in acting talent by Laura Dern, who plays her mother, Bobbi, an inspiring life force in her daughter’s life.
The film’s narrative switches between Cheryl’s backstory and a hallucinatory montage of one woman’s survivalist tale.
