Wild: a song of herself rising to a spiritual hymn

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There’s the suffering you choose, and there’s the suffering that chooses you. Walking the sometimes desolate, sometimes beautiful border between the two is Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s essential 2012 memoir and, now, this haunting film version of it, starring Reese Witherspoon.

Strayed’s book is as interior as its setting is exterior. It recounts her 1995 hike from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon–Washington line, a journey that she undertook impulsively following the death of her mother, a heroin-fueled descent into promiscuity, and a divorce from her first husband. Before all of this, she’d never heard of the Pacific Crest Trail. And then, suddenly, it seemed to her that strapping on a dreadnought of a pack, broiling under the cloudless sky and following the trail seemed her only course. Suffering as homeopathy, maybe. Risk, certainly. Dialogue, not so much. Beyond Strayed’s musing to herself and recalling the conversations and encounters that led her to the trail, Wild the book isn’t long on talk. It is instead a masterpiece of self-revelation, told with minimal human interaction.

Nick Hornby’s screenplay is perfect in its own way, finding the rue and the pride in Strayed’s narrative and giving a fierce, believable Witherspoon (and, as the mother, Laura Dern) deep opportunities even in near silence. Like Jean-Marc Vallée’s direction, Hornby’s script is constantly aware of distance. There aren’t many people in Wild, and most of the time, the characters are held apart. And when it’s just Witherspoon in the frame, even when she’s in close-up, nature’s impossible vastness dominates.

Echoing the book, some of the distance, some of the vastness, is temporal. Early reviews of the movie reported flashbacks within flashbacks — a storytelling head-scratcher that I was dreading. But Hornby and Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) more than justify the choice. What could have been a defeating jumble achieves something rare: the pace, repetition and super-collision of grief-stricken memory. (Part of the glue comes from snippets of song, most memorably a couple of Simon and Garfunkel standards, heard as Cheryl tries to keep herself together. Hornby, the novelist who gave us High Fidelity, flashes his record-geek badge in clever ways here.)

Strayed’s writing doesn’t lack specificity, yet the experience she so deftly chronicles in Wild (helped by nearly 20 years of germination) is less about a hard physical journey than it is about an elemental spiritual thirst. It has justifiably become a book of common prayer for people who otherwise avoid the self-help shelf. Which means that Wild didn’t cry out to be a movie; almost any production of it was likely to be a syrupy, voice-over-heavy mess. But Vallée, Hornby and Witherspoon (a producer) have instead made a triumph out of a triumph. Take a walk alone down your own block and write down every image or word that zaps through your brain. You may not end up with the signposts of illness, despair or panic that blink through Wild in its early going. But if you’re lucky, you’ll note little bolts of forgiveness and wonder, as Wild does — and does without obviousness or sentimentality.