This ain’t no Eat Pray Love .
Reese Witherspoon in Wild
Anne Marie Fox/Fox Searchlight
From a distance, Wild looks like it belongs to the Eat Pray Love school of movies adapted from stunt memoirs. You know, the ones in which an author embarks on a challenging new adventure, ostensibly to shake up their rote existence, but also in order to have something to write a book about. How spending a year traveling the world taught someone about happiness and a sense of self. How cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking taught someone about... happiness and a sense of self. They're popular, they go down easy with their messages of personal growth by way of a new hobby, and there are surely more adaptations to come — A. J. Jacobs, king of the genre, has actually had multiple works optioned for film and television.
The memoir on which Wild — directed by Dallas Buyers Club's Jean-Marc Vallée from a screenplay by Nick Hornby — is based definitely fits this basic formula. It's about the 1,100-mile solo voyage up the Pacific Crest Trail that Cheryl Strayed, with no experience hiking, took in the wake of her divorce, four grief-filled years after the death of her mother. Strayed certainly went on a journey of self-discovery in addition to the one that takes her along the PCT, and earned Oprah's blessing and a spot atop the New York Times best-seller list for it.
But Wild isn't a cuddly story of finding neat fulfillment, on the page or in film — its lessons, as much as they exist, are harder won and not the kind you'd put on a poster. It's a trip worth taking, not the least because you get to spend it in the character of Cheryl, played on screen by Reese Witherspoon in an unshowy but soulful turn, who is one of the year's most satisfyingly realized female characters.
Anne Marie Fox/Fox Searchlight
