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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Wild’: Tracking the trail of simplicity

Dan Webster

Amid the material offered up as holiday entertainment, "Wild" emerges as one worthy — if trying — view. Following is a transcription of the review of "Wild" that I recorded for Spokane Public Radio:

Most of us, I think, would agree that life is a complex process. One key to happiness, then, is to find some sense of simplicity. Jesus might have agreed with that. The Buddha certainly would have.

But that’s the irony: Searching for what’s simple ends up being hard. Because it’s hard to confront two dueling thoughts, much less emotions, at the same time. So we tend to eliminate. Things are good. Or they’re bad. Black or white. Up or down. Hot or cold.

Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t. But even when it does work, it seldom lasts. So we’re forced to restart the process – or bear down and insist that our first reaction was correct.

OK, this is a movie review, so let me shift gears. Most mainstream movies are designed for a popular audience. To achieve that, they typically opt to tell stories in a basic format – 120 pages of script equaling two hours of screen time, three-act structure … and so on. Even if you are doing something as complex as, say, the biblical story of Moses, you pare the story down to some sort of crisis – of resolving personal destiny, say, or even just sibling rivalry – throw in some special effects and there’s your movie.

Simplicity: See what I mean?

When director Jean-Marc Vallée took the job of adapting Cheryl Strayed’s nonfiction account of her trekking the Pacific Crest Trail, he faced a number of choices. Among those was how to capture Strayed’s inner turmoil following her mother’s death without boring us by explaining who Strayed was, outlining her situation and – maybe most important – giving us a reason to care. That latter task was key: Because as Strayed makes clear in her book, whatever reasons she had for acting badly, her heroin use and random sexual encounters stretch our capacity for empathy.

It was in 1995 that Strayed, then 26 and a lost soul, decided to hike 1,100 miles of the near 2,600-hundred-mile-long PCT, which runs from California through Washington. She was woefully unprepared, but she endured and as with the best of such human-versus-nature stories she emerged as someone new.

In portraying Strayed’s story cinematically, Vallée had luck on his side: Not only did Nick Hornby (writer of “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy”) adapt the screenplay, but Reese Witherspoon doubled as both producer and star. With Witherspoon having matured even beyond her Oscar-winning performance eight years ago in “Walk the Line,” and Hornby’s proven abilities to lighten even the heaviest of emotional angst, Vallée’s job was half complete.

All he had to do then was find a way to get us inside Strayed’s head without forcing Witherspoon to narrate long sections of the book. She does some narration, but much of her character’s inner turmoil comes through encounters with others, through flashbacks and the self-questioning inner dialogue that all of us are familiar with.

Vallée’s skill at pulling everything together in just the right measure, and doing so in a way that puts a woman’s story at the forefront of a major Hollywood production, makes my final pronouncement as simple I can state it: “Wild” is one of my favorite films of 2014.