Vallée: Wild (2014)

In 1994, Cheryl Strayed – then Cheryl Nyland – walked the entire Pacific Crest Trail in an effort to come to terms with the death of her mother, her subsequent addiction to heroin and the breakdown of her first marriage. Some twenty years later, she shared her journey of self-discovery in Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which forms the basis for Wild, a travelogue-biopic that stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed, Laura Dern as her mother and Thomas Sadoski as her ex-husband. Taking its cues from the memoir, the entire film is shot within the confines of the Pacific Crest Trail – it opens at the Mexican border and closes at the Bridge of the Gods, on the Oregon-Washington border, where Strayed would end up settling for the next twenty years – and that’s a bold move, since it means that Strayed’s story and character has to emerge through flashbacks and interior monologues, an impressionistic sense of her consciousness more than a fully developed or elaborated narrative. To that end, Jean-Marc Vallee situates the film at the hinge between past and present, and between landscape and memory, by way of a series of synaesthetic montage sequences, bursts of sound, image and texture, that make the past feel too present for flashbacks to really operate in a conventional way. Sound, in particular, plays a pivotal role, as Strayed’s thoughts and epiphanies often convey themselves in a kind of musical mentalese, a gorgeous taste for the way songs pare themselves back, over time, to so many inchoate mnemonic cues, as the soundscape cycles through bridges, hooks and fragments that seem urgently familiar, even if you can’t always place where they come from, or even what decade they were first released. In the process, you come to feel acquainted with with Strayed’s consciousness in the same way that you might have once felt acquainted with classical singer-songwriters – there’s a bedsitter ambience, a chamber hush that often feels peculiarly and poetically attuned to the purity and austerity of second-wave feminism, women who left their lives behind to set themselves against the wilderness. The same sublime sense of scale too, as the second-wave feminist project, as Strayed fuses feminist and frontier consciousness, taking deeper and deeper draughts of the vast lonelinesses that mobilised her ancestors – Joni Mitchell, Erica Jong, Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson are all touchstones – in a film that eludes both present and past for a future that feels tremulously, almost traumatically open.