“Wild” opens with the cheerful sight of Reese Witherspoon pulling her own toenail off. Begone, you lily-livered armchair hikers! This movie has blisters.
And, like Witherspoon’s character at that moment, its boots are a little too small for its feet. Co-produced by the star and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club”), “Wild” is an adaptation of the 2012 best-selling memoir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” in which Cheryl Strayed recounted her 1,100-mile walk from California to Washington State in 1996. The trek is physically punishing and psychologically grueling; more to the point, it provides a three-month window into the inner life of a woman as she tows her past uphill.
The movie gets much of the book and has the added benefit of scenery — lots of it, deserts and mountains and forests spreading out to the far horizons. Vanishing point is this story’s unstated theme: How far into the wilderness does a woman have to go before who she was disappears and who she might yet be comes into view?
Strayed was coming off a very rough patch when she set out from the Mojave Desert with a pack the size of a small RV on her back. (She called it “The Monster.”) After her mother’s early death from cancer, she had embarked on a self-nullifying tour of excess, sleeping with many men who were not her husband and tumbling down the ladder of intoxicants until she landed at the bottom with heroin. “I’m an experimentalist,” she defensively tells her best friend (Gaby Hoffmann) in a flashback scene. “I’m the girl who says yes instead of no.”
By the film’s present-tense sequences, she’s clean, sober, and full of regrets. The trek is an empty space in which the character can confront her past and ultimately outwalk it, and much of “Wild” consists of Strayed on the move, alone with her thoughts. This is a place few mainstream movies go, and the star honors the occasion with a performance that’s wary and watchful, tending to her ghosts while keeping one eye up the trail for strangers. Witherspoon’s Cheryl Strayed could be Tracy Flick or Elle Woods with a lot more miles on her, and the jut of the actress’s jaw for once seems earned rather than entitled or cute. It’s not a big, bravura performance, the kind we’re used to in end-of-the-year movies. The actress is too smart for that and her character too exhausted.
Where “Wild” disappoints is in the didactic, show-and-tell approach of Vallée’s direction and of the screenplay, which, surprisingly, is by Nick Hornby, writer of “High Fidelity,” “About a Boy,” and “Fever Pitch,” and screenwriter of “An Education.” An Education is what Strayed gets in this movie, with each memory leading to a telling flashback which leads to a carefully chosen literary quote or soundtrack choice which leads to the appropriate lesson learned, for her and for us. There’s a dulling neatness to the making of this movie, and it reminds you that when personal growth is on the menu, art has usually left the restaurant. Vallée’s “Wild” isn’t quite the Oprah reading guide to the book, but at times it comes close.
What saves the flashbacks is the incandescent Laura Dern as Strayed’s mother, Bobbi, one of those aggravating saints who keeps smiling through everything with which life punishes her: abusive husbands, poverty, cancer. Of course a daughter would look at this woman and wonder: Are you insane? And of course a daughter might seesaw between wanting to be like this woman and punishing herself for never coming close. The movie doesn’t have to come out and say that for us to understand. But it says it anyway.
“Wild” is at its best — speaks most loudly, ironically — when it observes life and human interaction on the trail. As a female hiker, Strayed is a figure of curiosity and concern, not to mention creepier forms of attention. A run-in with a threatening pair of bow-hunters (Charles Baker and J. D. Evermore) makes us aware of her very real vulnerability; a piggish ranger (Brian Van Holt) treats her as special and just makes her feel worse.
But they’re easily outnumbered by the men who understand the fellowship of the long walk, by a friendly, rough-edged farmer (W. Earl Brown), and by another woman (Cathryn de Prume) who, like Strayed, is trying to outrace something in her past. It doesn’t much matter what. At such moments, “Wild” has the rare sense to simply listen to women listening, both to the immediacy of the world around them and for whatever’s coming in on the wind.
More coverage:
- ‘Wild,’ ‘Tracks’ take female physical quests
- Boston Film Festival marks 30th year with ‘Wild’ start (9/20)
- In Toronto, what they’re talking about at the festival (9/13)
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.