Wild - Villi vaellus

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. (06.03.2015)

I found the Emilio Estevez’s recent, similarly conceived The Way, in which a father embarks on a journey to find his dead son, more to my liking. It had more interesting interactions between the characters whom the protagonist encountered on his journey. Wild contains a few cool scenes, has a pleasant outdoor atmosphere and Reese Witherspoon holds the movie together. But the flashbacks depicting her relationships with the people from her past do not drive the film forward as much as they should. In comparison, Aron Ralston’s life in flashbacks in 127 Hours was much more powerful and, together with the situation the protagonist had to get out of, managed to completely captivate me. However, Wild still remains a good film worthy of three and a half stars. (07.03.2015)

Beautiful scenery, a charismatic girl, Simon and Garfunkel, a meaningful story and emotions. If I were to recall something similar in type and genre, the last time I enjoyed a film like this was Penn's Into the Wild eleven years ago. The protagonist of that one had different motivations, but both have something in common: they are searching for themselves in a beautiful, purifying landscape. At the beginning I wasn't really hooked, the sudden cuts were a bit confusing, but as time went on I got incredibly engaged. I understood the main character, I envied her determination to do something with herself, and I'm so glad that Vallée didn't slip into cheap tropes, that some scenes that could have slid into a fatal ending were resolved in a different way and the clichés were avoided. And the way Vallée works with flashbacks is a masterpiece, too. And especially Reese – she put everything into the role, she even produced it herself; girl I admire you! Reese is just a God-given talent, like Vallée, I have yet to see a bad or even just mediocre film from him. (21.09.2018)

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% (07.03.2015)

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. (26.02.2015)