Wild

There are two reasons to check out these spiritual odysseys like Wild or Into The Wild: the haunting scenery and spiritual cleansing, or at least the psychological nitty-gritty of a main character full of opinions, attitudes and experiences that come into direct confrontation with the question of whether this or that decision is good or bad. With a little imagination, everyone will find themselves, at least for a while in some passages. They have done it cleverly and for good measure put in basically all the negative model situations that can happen to a person from an early age (a bully father, illness, poverty, drugs, etc.). Wild is less psychedelic and puts more emphasis on family, relationships and the formation of what one should have, or not have in life and what one should prioritise. Reese Witherspoon is convincing and solid, but doesn't, as it tends to do, get under the skin as she should, as despite all the blood and sweat it's still just a bedtime story, or rather a good morning one. (11/15/2015)

Though Wild is very well rhythmised in twenty-minute segments, due to the logic of the plot new revelations cannot reverse the course of events, but only contribute to our understanding of the protagonist. Especially in the final third, we could criticise the film for the fact that it suffers from a low level of action and structural repetitiveness. However, if we don’t judge it by the standards of mannishly linear “action” films, the narrative cyclicity with the returning of motifs as fixed ideas (instead of development of those motifs) is conversely what makes Wild a unique film that is both outwardly and inwardly feminist. 80% (03/07/2015)

A conventional travel drama about the search for oneself, which Jean-Marc Vallée is able to enrich with interesting flashbacks, most of the time. They develop several themed storylines that focus on the magnetic Reese Witherspoon. Her transformation from a frightened novice who isn’t able to lift her own backpack to queen of the PCT is so impressively experienced, so much so that one also forgets balancing on the edge of kitsch, a bit of amateurish symbolism and a stretched last third. Not that Hornby's "book-like" screenplay helps with its pronounced durability and depth, but as a pleasant spiritual trip through a beautiful landscape for one evening, it's absolutely okay. (03/06/2015)

Reese Witherspoon delivered quite a respectable performance in this movie. Already in the beginning, she showed how easily a chipped nail can be torn from a toe which went through a two-hundred-kilometer hike on a trek across the Rocky Mountains with an elevation gain of least thirty kilometers. After a moment, however, a totally typical story began to unravel. It shows us Reese who is going through purgatory, at first without showing the reason, and we’ll only get to know the reason gradually, from the glimpses of her memories. It took me some time to attune to her, and about a halfway into the movie everything was clear to me. And from that moment I started to really enjoy the movie. Too bad that the ending was too open. I like open endings in movies like this but in this case it kind of faded away into nothing. The Way (2010) is much better in this respect. Anyhow, Reese’s performance was really great – I’d say even greater that the elevation gain she had to tackle during the movie. (02/26/2015)

Better than Into the Wild, it works much better with the dosing of information and always has something to reveal. Reese is great and you never lose interest in her character, though many of the scenes are not precisely the most memorable (but many are enriched by “El Condor Pasa”). For me it’s also valuable as an educational documentary – I realised that I would go on a long nature trip only with a bunch of armed friends and accompanied by a car carrying beer, a coolbox and a grill. That would be proper wilderness. 75% (04/09/2020)