#jean-marc vallée

Young Victoria ~ Jean-Marc Vallée

Days away from the end of our yearlong journey I sit in a dark theater and watch a lone women staring down the barrel of a solo, thousand mile trek through the wilderness. At the very first sign post, loaded up with the weight of too much ambition and a monstrous pack, she pulls a journal from a small box by the road and writes a simple message I wish I had heard before the start of our odyssey: “If your nerve deny you, go above your nerve.” – Emily Dickinson. It’s a perfect way to start on her path as much as Wild is the perfect way to end mine.

In Wild, Reese Witherspoon gives us her defining performance as Cheryl Strayed, a divorcee and former drug addict who’s life has spun out of control after an abusive childhood and a family loss. The film follows her journey of self-discovery through adversity at the hands of the 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail: a wilderness trek stretching from Mexico to Canada. At first the Cheryl we meet is spunky and strong albeit clearly working through some relationship issues. She unpacks and repacks her insane amount of hiking gear in the cheap motel she rented from a suspicious inn keep. She hitchhikes to the trailhead, the music on the radio causing flashbacks to dancing as a child with her mother. She’s dropped off, loaded up, and then she is alone staring at the first segment of her epic journey: The Mojave Desert. No more than 100 feet into the trail a thin, echoed voice from inside Cheryl’s head asks, “What the fuck am I doing?”

It’s access to that internal monologue that sets Wild apart from other extreme isolation movies like Cast Away and All is Lost. And it’s those splintery flashes of memory that keep us firmly rooted in the journey while still giving us insight into her past. In fact it’s these devices, more so than the powerful story or even Witherspoon’s honest, understated performance that truly set the film apart from similar journey epics like 2010’s The Way. The flashback sequences, such as they are, are often momentary and overlaid with the audio from present scene. Even the more lengthy ones sprout organically from memory triggers and blend back into the present with audiovisual overhangs. Along with access to Cheryl’s internal voice, all the while singing bits of songs caught in her head or asking herself questions, it is the most realistic portrayal of how a person actually thinks and how memory actually works that I’ve ever seen on screen.

The deeper into the journey she goes the more we see of the life that led her here. The failed marriage, the infidelity, the drugs, the abortion, and great personal losses all bubble up and burst on screen only to disappear as quick as they came for us to watch Cheryl’s face as she relives them. To it’s credit though, even with all the deplorable acts and horrible memories we watch Cheryl live through, it never feels like the unbearable punitive tragedy porn we get from films like The Road or even this year’s Unbroken. Every memory has a reason and adds a layer of understanding and empathy, or shock and enmity to this character we thought we knew. What we end up with is a real, relatable picture of a broken woman trying to walk herself back to the woman her mother raised her to be.

The story itself is not trivial either. The challenges she faces along the trail and the people she meets are all deeply interesting. Her backstory is fleshed out piece by piece in digestible, carefully distributed chunks. The film lends credence to the lack of safety a woman alone can face without bending the actual facts of the story. There are genuine moments of hardship, triumph, and joy. It never tries too hard or shouts too loud. It is simply the delicate, ugly, awesome truth of a life.

Over the last year we’ve loved, hated, griped, cheated, and risen to the occasion all in equal measure. What seems simple, as an idea (such as ‘lets review a movie every day’ or ‘I’m going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail’) becomes an unwieldy beast you have to battle every day. There are pitfalls and victories, roadblocks and easy days. As hard as it is if you take the time once in a while to stop and look around, to see how far you’ve come, dream about what you can do with the time you have left, and put yourself in the way of beauty, what went from simple thought to impossible task reveals itself for what it always was: a great adventure. 

-Andrew