Wild (I) (2014)

After consummating "McConaissance" in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (2013), Jean-Marc Vallée's next step is another star-vehicle biography, Reese Witherspoon plays Cheryl Strayed, a young woman embarked on a 2,650-mile hike of Pacific Crest Trail from Minneapolis, Minnesota to the Bridge of the Gods connecting Oregon and Washington in 1995. The aim of her journey is to detoxicate herself from her past bad habits of promiscuity and heroin addiction which had encroached her entire life after the untimely death of her mother Bobbi (Dern) and had already destroyed her marriage with Paul (Sadoski).

Opening with a cringing-inducing toenail-plucking gambit, as if the film is promising us an unpromising depiction of the mission-impossible trek for a novice hiker, then incessantly throws back spasmodic flashbacks to proffer backgrounds of our heroine in order to wheedle us into awe-inspiring admiration. The approach is recommendable, but there is a problem at hand (at least for me), my admiration is already in full default mode for anyone who has the willpower and actually accomplishes the formidable undertaking, so to progressively know her back-story can only amass my cynical suspicions of either a victorious bandwagon out of vainglory or a navel-gazing inspection to find an excuse for her self-destructive conducts, or both. Fortunately, the film opts for a safer route, neither blatantly beautifies her ritual of reborn, nor goes digging deep into her most vulnerable part in her memories. Generically, it maintains her long haul in a tepid temperature apart from the overhanging threat of being raped in the wilderness, as the ethical yardstick for Cheryl's before/after metamorphosis.

Witherspoon finally proves that it is not just a fluke for her (undeserving) Oscar triumph in WALK THE LINE (2005, 9/10), which takes her almost a decade. Granted that the physical endeavour of a petite Witherspoon shouldering on her ginormous backpack for the first time before her hiking already pre-empts audience's respect, she is still unable to fuel her role with a consistent intensity to make viewers wow for her through and through, check her scenes with Dern, where she conspicuously fades into background or looks rather wooden in comparison, the but when she is on her own, she is fine, sometimes even great, for her daring nudes scenes and (spoiler alert) making out with drop-dead gorgeous Michiel Huisman.

Laura Dern is the dark horse in the BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS race this year, since her screen time is not only brief, but exclusively in flashbacks as well, not to mention most of those scenes are edited into transitory fragments as if she is just a symbolistic prop to burden Cheryl's mental state. In fact Dern has only one Oscar-bait scene when she tells Cheryl the reason of being cheerful and optimistic in their not-so-perfect life, she nails it impeccably, and de facto she is the one who really deserves a renaissance!

On a whole, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the movie, the performances is its strongest suit, but the empty nature of its material restrains it from being a resounding feminist opus, and Vallée's execution doesn't enhance the film to match the caliber of his best offering, aka. C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005, 8/10).