Wild, based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed 8.3 out of 10

Wild, based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed

8.3 out of 10

Reese Witherspoon – nominated for an Academy Award for her performance – offers the audience a tour de force in this Wild motion picture, where the main character takes almost everything to the extremes, when she uses drugs it is with fervor and abandon, while she has a period of frequent sex – conservatives would call that fornication – it is again intense and finally, when she decides to take a hike, she accomplishes the impossible and travels alone for…one thousand one hundred miles!

The story is told with flashbacks, in various tense moments, when the temperature drops to well below zero, she throws away perhaps her most valuable belongings, the walking boots, the protagonist thinks mostly of her deceased mother, Bobbi aka Laura Dern, also nominated for an Oscar for her remarkable acting, the abuse she has suffered from a violent father, that they had had to run away from, one night, in a pouring rain that looked like a storm , after this aggressive, villainous parent wanted to offer a “fist sandwich „and had terrified his family.

Surely in part because of this disturbed, unhappy childhood experience, the adult Cheryl, the heroine of the film, will have issues, trouble in keeping to a stable relationship, and for an unfortunate period, she would have coitus with strangers met in bars, or customers in the restaurant where she was a waitress, in one occasion, apparently taking one man after another, in the alley at the back of the diner.

Most of the movie takes the public on a road trip, along the Pacific Crest Trail, where the woman that lacks any experience would try to find herself – as another woman hiker puts it later in the feature – experiencing cold, hunger, thirst, almost any adversity we could think of, right from the start of this tremendous challenge that could be called madness, when she tries to cook something on what she had brought along, only to find it is impossible, for she has the wrong fuel and she becomes rather aggravated, right from the first few moments.

She meets a man on a tractor, a bizarre individual – she would be scared of various things along the way, although she would be called by some The Queen of the Trail, because she does get some help, together with criticism and some abuse, form strangers – who offers her shelter, but on some conditions.

Cheryl Strayed keeps remembering her mother; the time when she was terminally ill, in the hospital, the frustration, deep sorrow felt when the doctor states that it would take about one year, only to find that the poor Bobbi would vanish in just one month, donating her cornea for a transplant.

One heartbreaking, terrible memory centers on the horse Bobbi had had and which she had loved, a gentle creature that had saved her life and now that it is old and the owner is about to depart needs to be taken care of, a humane, kind solution would have to be found.

Alas, the wonderful horse, an animal that we can see is gentle, kind, the image of loyalty and serenity is old and sick, Cheryl talks with her brother who says that they have no money to take it to the vet and then we see him holding a rifle and aiming for the soon to be departed noble friend.

Apart from this tragic, horrible moment and other adversities and traumas that are specific for what is after all a compelling drama – based on the real life experience of Cheryl Strayed – there are some amusing incidents, like the one in the beauty shop, where the protagonist stops after one long chapter in the hike, in one of the few places where humans live and she looks at some lipstick.

The shop assistant walks to her, compliments the travelling woman on the way the product looks on her face, mentions something in the line of sales and products, but then we see her taken aback and talking of the importance of cleanliness, for she had obviously been hit hard by the ‘flagrance’ emanating from a body that had spent so many long days in the Wild.

Cheryl makes it clear that she has every intention of taking a bath, although she had just been treated as a simpleton that has no idea about what people need to do in order to smell decently and not like a corpse –

Come to think of it, one of the obsessions of the under signed refers to Trump and his supporters – here, far from the ‘most advanced democracy in the world’, we find it next to impossible to understand how the free world has come to this…have such an idiot enthroned by supporters who surely do not smell – literally - like Cheryl after the trail – most of them – but their thinking surely is rotten beyond that.

Speaking of the absurd – Trump, the Muller report, the lying US attorney general, who has been about as ridiculous as the Orange Calamity he defends – there are some scenes ion the Wild that appear otherworldly.

One is the moment when the protagonist walks in the snow – she has do that for an excruciating period wearing…some sort of improvised slippers, for in a moment of despair she has thrown in the abyss her good, solid boots – and some skier glide in front of her and she tries to find where she is…

California!

The other scene that comes to mind is when she meets in the forest with a…llama and then the grandmother and child who own it, the child explaining that he suffers from an affliction or he has an issue that he cannot talk about, prompting this viewer to think that he would reveal some dark secret any moment now and we would learn that he is abducted or there is some other horrible path we would be taken on.

Wild is educational, inspiring, meditative as well as action packed at times and the heroine is phenomenal – setting aside her drug and addiction periods.