Wild

Wild (2014) comes from Cheryl Strayed's own memoir. After her mother's death a woman whose life has fallen apart decides, with no experience at all, to walk more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. The film does not treat the hike as a straight line; every few steps it jumps backwards, and the real story is back there. Reese Witherspoon announced in March 2012 that she intended to make it and produced it herself. Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay. Photography began in October 2013 in Oregon and California. Witherspoon has described the shoot like this: she would run up a hill with a forty five pound pack, then be told the pack did not look heavy enough, put on a sixty five pound one, and run up the same hill nine or ten more times. Cheryl Strayed was on set through the Oregon shoot and appears early in the film in a small part, as the woman who drops the character at the motel. Witherspoon was nominated for Best Actress and Laura Dern, who plays her mother, for Best Supporting Actress. It runs 115 minutes. Good for: films about grief, solitude outdoors, and honest accounts of putting yourself back together. Less good for: drug use and sex are shown plainly. The flashback structure feels scattered to some viewers, and the physical difficulty of the walk never fully converts into dramatic tension.