“I was handheld and my Arri Alexa camera weighed close to what Reese was carrying in her backpack. She’d say, ‘are you okay?’ — and she was carrying even more. She was thinking of me, maybe because I was older.”
“‘You Are Here'”, reads Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), from a poster tacked to a corkboard in a classroom. “I see that poster everywhere and I fucking hate it. Why would you ever want to teach a child that they don’t matter?” She glares at the therapist (Randy Schulman) seated across from her, his argyle sweater and beard making him seem as much a cliché as the poster Cheryl’s assessing. He proceeds to act out this cliché, turning each of her statements into a question, as in, for instance, “Who detached from you?” or again, “Do you feel as though you matter?”
Cheryl, for all the trauma she embodies and explores in the movie Wild, has at least one ready answer here. “I know I matter,” she says. You believe her, despite her current emotional wreckage, heroin use, and sex with random men. You believe her because you’ve already see her before this moment and after, as a young woman with her loving and enormously supportive mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), and as a child, played by Bobbi Strayed Lindstrom, daughter of the Cheryl Strayed who wrote the memoir on which the film is based.
The film intercuts these scenes, layering and translating the internal life Strayed portrays in her memoir as a non-chronological tangle of impressions, memories, and nightmares, put together and coming apart as Strayed walks 1,100 miles, up the Pacific Crest Trail. She does all this after losing her mother to cancer and then embarking on a series of behaviors that might be described as “self-destructive”, though during the brief scene with the be-sweatered therapist, Cheryl suggests that her drug use and sexual adventures make her feel, however briefly, “happy” rather than not, and moreover, that “talking” about any of it is deeply unhelpful.
As soon as she says this, Cheryl walks out into the hallway, school lockers and bland wall paint marking the utter melancholy of the institutional setting. Here she sees Bobbi, or her spirit embodied for movie purposes, available to embrace Cheryl in her desperate state, denoted by a black leather jacket and sunken, heroin user’s eyes. The scene doesn’t so much provide a breakthrough as it repeats what you know, that Cheryl is coming to terms with her loss, as well as her anger at an abusive drunk of a dad, visible in just enough flashbacks so you share her anger, or maybe just understand the shorthand.
It’s not surprising that Wild uses such shorthand. It also offers up the sort of episodic structure that’s common to such projects, drawn from memoirs, and in particular, memoirs of journeys. Cheryl’s emotional trajectory is helped along by a few narrated passages from her journal and structured according to people she meets during her trek. These include many men, a point underlined by her responses she gets, namely, surprise that she’s a woman traveling like this, alone. The burden she bears is made comically, and rather materially, real when she must sometimes struggle to lift or walk with the gigantic pack on her back; indeed, one new acquaintance calls it the Monster, and so it seems, looming over her, weighing on her.
The metaphor works in multiple ways, from the personal ordeals she confronts to the social expectations she can’t avoid. The metaphor is framed by her encounters, with other hikers and a ranger hoping to invite her to bed, as well as another girl on the trail (“You’re a woman!” Cheryl exclaims when she spots her, thrilled to see someone who looks like her) and a self-designated reporter for Hobo Times, Jimmy Carter (Mo McRae), who insists she’s a hobo, so she might both fit his idea of hobos and also not. “I’ve noticed its often personal trauma that forces people out of their life and into the hobo life,” he observes, taking notes and reaching for his camera seemingly at e same time. “Would you say that’s been the case for you?” No matter that Cheryl insists that this is not the case, that in fact, this is “my life, I’m just taking a little time out. This is not a hobo life. I don’t know what else to tell you.” Jimmy’s got a story, one he knows, and he can’t see past it.
Cheryl has her own stories, of course. When, early on, she meets a man on a tractor, Frank (W. Earl Brown), you and she both anticipate typical trouble. When the worst he offers up is a secret sharing of rope licorice (“Don’t tell my wife: she hates it when I eat candy!”), you’re reminded that not all stories turn out like you expect. While you might anticipate how Wild turns out, the route to that end is not nearly so regular. The tangles Cheryl embraces and the movie makes visible, in its layering of time and image, experience and anticipation, are lasting.