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Thursday, January 8, 2015

In the Wild

WordMaster


At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss Wild, Jean-Marc Vallée’s adaptation of the 2012 Cheryl Strayed memoir, as schmaltzy inspiration porn – Eat, Pray, Walk, someone on my Twitter timeline joked derisively. It is, after all, the true-life story of a not-destitute white woman who embarks on a journey of self-discovery, the kind of didactic, feel-good confection that awards bodies gobble up like chips, ostensibly serving little purpose other than to provide its star performer with an opportunity to do Real Acting and gain some positive PR along the way. Frankly, as someone who nurses a deep-seated, perhaps irrational bias against biopics (anything revolving around a specific historical or living figure, really), I approached Wild with a certain skepticism, the way many critics seem to regard superhero or Hobbit movies, steeling myself for a pandering, by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser that I would inevitably forget the instant I left the theater.

It did not take long, however, for me to see that my fears were unwarranted. The film opens in medias res, finding Strayed at an unstipulated point on her 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches all the way from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada. Quiet reigns as she settles on a rock and removes her shoe to reveal a broken toenail coated in dried blood, a startlingly gruesome image to encounter at the very beginning of a movie whose marketing campaign focused predominantly on its uplifting tone and postcard-pretty scenery (several people at my screening audibly winced). Strayed then proceeds to accidentally drop the shoe (cue more gasps), watching in dismay as it tumbles down the mountainside before deciding to fling her other shoe after it with a fierce, piercing scream. It was that scream, that fleeting outburst of raw, tempestuous emotion, that assured me this was going to be different from your standard Oscar-bait, less hesitant to confront the messy ambiguities of reality.



Wild unfolds like a spell, patient and hypnotic. Vallée employs his signature improvisational style to considerably greater effect here than in his previous outing, 2013’s disjointed yet awards-laden Dallas Buyers Club, assembling scenes with a nimble, subdued spontaneity that allows them to breathe and meander. Memories surface in flashes, glimmers of disembodied sound and fragmented images that flit in and out of consciousness as if on a whim, circling and spilling into one another, past and present blended together, gradually crystallizing to form a jumbled yet meaningful whole; this is a rare instance when flashbacks don’t feel like superfluous, momentum-stalling detours but rather threads woven inextricably into the fabric of the narrative. Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby also make smart use of voiceover, which works less to convey exposition than to give shape to the nonlinear, amorphous plot, as well as music. Comprised primarily of rock and folk artists such as The Hollies and Simon & Garfunkel, the soundtrack represents the film’s soul, its lyrical mix of twanging guitars, lively beats and impassioned crooning evoking both the lonesome sprawl of untamed America and the restless rhythm of Strayed’s psyche. This juxtaposition between the grand and individual heightens the intensely personal, subjective nature of the story; true to its memoir origins, Wild never attempts to impose any meaning on the heroine’s journey other than what it means to her.

             To say it transcends populist sentimentality might be a stretch – the movie features a hearty dose of moralistic aphorisms like “We’re rich in love,” the majority of which are uttered by Cheryl’s free-spirited mother Bobbi, portrayed by the luminous, perennially under-appreciated Laura Dern. But even at its most maudlin, Wild exhibits an earnest poise that’s difficult to resist. Naturally, much of its success must be credited to Reese Witherspoon, who serves as not only the film’s star and only performer with substantial screen time but also its most fervent champion, having optioned the source material and co-produced it through her nascent company, Pacific Standard. For one designed to carry a movie and potentially rejuvenate the actor’s career, Witherspoon’s performance is surprisingly, refreshingly free of vanity – no gimmicks or showboating, just the simple, sublime feat of bringing a person to life on screen. She conveys palpable empathy for Strayed, refusing to shy away from the real-life woman’s complexities and treating her neither as pitiful nor heroic but as someone with a story worth telling.

             But what makes Wild truly memorable is its distinctly feminine sensibility. As patronizing as it might seem to praise a movie just because its main character happens to be a woman, the reality is that, in an industry that remains aggressively dominated by projects made by, centered on and aimed at men, anything that defies the norm feels like a blast of fresh air. Furthermore, just as Thelma and Louise is much more than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with women, this is not merely a female version of Into the Wild. To pretend otherwise, to assign it some kind of false universality, would be to erase all the little details and nuances that indicate it belongs specifically to a woman: Strayed’s instinctively wary reaction to encountering strange men; the compassionate manner with which her sexuality is handled (cinematographer Yves Bélanger achieves the near-impossible in framing female nudity without straying into fetishization); the rejection of the usual perseverance/conqueror narrative in favor of one promoting redemption through and harmony with nature. So perceptive is the film to Strayed’s mindset and experiences that if I hadn’t already known otherwise, I would’ve sworn it was directed or written by women. It inhabits what feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter called “the wild zone”, a metaphorical space that provides women a voice and language separate from dominant patriarchal culture, unknown to men. If men find the wild intimidating, a beast to be tamed, for women like Strayed, it’s freeing; it’s something of their own.








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