Honestly, Wild has just about stumped me. The film is so good, yet it has one major problem. I have been thinking about it for days, and still I am having trouble with it. However I have ultimately settled on a full opinion. Wild is a film that has two storylines; at first they fight each other, but eventually they come together. The question that comes with the film is whether it can survive the beginning fragmenting. It does for the most part, and this is what brings the two storylines together. Also tying the story’s many pieces together was the very real performance by Reese Witherspoon. She has kind of fallen from the limelight,and I'm really glad to see her come back in a big way. Between Wild and Mud she might be able to make more of a career. Witherspoon is playing Cheryl Strayed, a women who decides to hike the Pacific Coast Trail in order to get over the death of her mother, who died years earlier. It's also to get over her last method of grieving--sex and heroine. We spend a lot of time with Witherspoon as this character. It's fantastic that she keeps her energy up as we watch her ultimately hike with only the sounds around her and the beautiful scenery of the trail. She does meet people, but this is much more of a mental journey for the character. Moments of trauma result in her thinking about the bad times in her life. Moments of triumph lead to happy thoughts. These thoughts are mostly displayed in flashbacks that randomly pop in. These flashbacks are a little scattershot and really quite jarring. This is because the tones of the hike and the flashbacks, even though they deal with similar emotions, come of with different tones. I know you can't add fully tangible drama to a film of a person on a hike by just having them hike, but a little more subtlety would have helped blend the differing tones. That's not to say that the flashbacks are bad. They are acted extremely well,and they give us insight into why this hike is happening. Laura Dern is really the star of these portions as Witherspoon’s mother, even if her cheeriness seems less authentic than much of the film. She and the other supporting cast really do sell the entire thing though. But when you get down to it this is a film about a person’s journey. It has beautiful cinematography. It's well directed and by the end very engrossing. I felt a wave of emotion in the film’s closing moments. This film was really a journey, both physically and mentally. I give Wild a 9 out of 10. Reviewed by Stephen Tronicek. Edited by Holly Clemons.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |