Reese Witherspoon Movie Perfectly Captures Cheryl Strayed’s PCT adventure

The hugely talented writer Nick Hornby must know a thing or two about what it feels like to have one’s book translated into film. Two of Hornby’s critically acclaimed novels – About a Boy and High Fidelity – have been made into movies, and no doubt the process involved some degree of anxiety and fear. It’s got to be hard, having someone else take your work of art and make it their own.

Anne Marie Fox/Fox Searchlight Pictures

Perhaps his experience on the other side of the writer-screenwriter relationship had something to do with Hornby’s carfeul, tender film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s blockbuster memoir, Wild. The screenplay is fiercely loyal to Strayed’s original story: prismatic, emotionally dense, a swirl of flashbacks in which experience sparks memory and memory shapes the feeling of those experiences. Hornby and director Jean-Marc Vallée have made a movie that feels, truly, like a book.

Reese Witherspoon’s portrayal of the mixed-up Strayed – who in the mid-nineties, at the age of 26, set off to hike much of the Pacific Crest Trail by herself – cements the novelistic feel. There’s already a lot of Oscar buzz surrounding Witherspoon’s acting, and for good reason. She delivers a layered performance that captures Strayed in all of her tumultuous moods: angry, heart-broken, confused, depressed, joyous, and triumphant. Over the course of a hard-won, thousand-mile trek, Witherspoon makes us feel a sympathy for this sometimes unsympathetic character who sought a kind of redemption in the wilderness.

Strayed’s memoir has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 88 weeks, including seven weeks in the top spot. Oprah picked it for her book club. So you’ve probably heard something about the tale. In case not, here’s the setup.

At the too-young age of 45, Strayed’s mother (played by a vibrant Laura Dern) died of cancer. “She was the love of my life,” Strayed says at one point in the film, and the loss crushed her, launching a spiral of self-destruction. She dabbled with heroin – first snorting, then smoking it, then shooting up. Although she had a loving husband, she screwed around with other men – a lot of other men. Already orphaned, she quickly found herself divorced and, essentially, homeless.

It was at this nadir in her life, standing in a drugstore checkout line, that she saw a book about the Pacific Crest Trail. The photo on the cover – a pristine-looking high alpine lake – was magnetic. Strayed decided that what she needed was to make a foray into the wilderness. “I want to be in the way of beauty,” she says in the film. “I’m going to walk until I become the woman my mother thought I was.”

This idea of wilderness as a crucible for self-reinvention is, of course, one of the foundational beliefs of the modern appreciation of the wild – a through-line stretching from Teddy Roosevelt to Sigurd Olson to Terry Tempest Williams. To some degree, it worked for Strayed, too. “The wilderness had a clarity that included me,” she writes in her memoir. The experience of day-after-day hiking was as hard as her divorce and the death of her mother – but “hard in a different way.” “The experience was powerful and fundamental,” and she discovers “how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.”

Well said, I thought when reading the book. Yet some backpackers (especially thru-hikers of the PCT or Appalachian Trail) have criticized Strayed for her failure to complete the whole trail or her clueless lack of preparation (which both Strayed and Witherspoon work to comic effect). The backwoods critics seem to miss the point. At some level, everyone – even the Patagonia- and North Face-sponsored pros – go into the wilderness unprepared. In the wild, you never know what you’ll encounter, and so you have to be intrepid and resourceful and courageous, no matter your level of experience. In the end, the ever-tenacious Strayed demonstrates all of those qualities in spades.

Strayed’s inexperience and her transformation on the trail is exactly what makes her story so universally appealing. Just as we are each unprepared for the challenges of life’s path, so, too, do we all make a lot of mistakes. Strayed’s mistakes and poor choices might have been unnecessary, but they are not uncommon.

The movie nails this tone of non-judgment just right. The film is also pitch-perfect in its depiction of what the wilderness feels like, especially for a first-timer. We see Witherspoon’s fear when she’s alone in the middle of nowhere in the night, the jumpiness toward menace both real and imagined. We get a glimpse of the mysterious ways of wild animals. If you’ve ever spent a single night in the backcountry, you’ll get a prick of recognition when Strayed seems spellbound by something as simple as hot oatmeal in the morning.

The only off-note in this otherwise fine film is the unnecessarily heavy handed voiceover at the end. “I got lost in the wilderness,” Witherspoon narrates on a fog-shrouded bridge in Oregon, “and found my way out of the woods.”

The memoir itself never delivers such a tidy lesson. Strayed (who for a couple of years was the anonymous advice columnist “Dear Sugar” at the literary website The Rumpus) is too brave and too honest a writer for that. Instead, the book ends more ambiguously, just shy of redemption. “It was enough to trust that what I’d done was true,” she writes on the last page of the book. I guess you could say that, at the very least, her time on the PCT gave Strayed the one thing you know you’ll get after months in the wild: A ripping good yarn.