WILD: Better Than Your Average Oscar-Bait

Every year when Oscar season rolls around I become an increasingly cynical person. I stop enjoying the movies I’m watching and instead start to tick off the list of tropes I see in a game I like to call “Oscar-bait Bingo.” In the coming months, cinema screens worldwide will be treated to my two least favorite Oscar-baiting sub-genres: non-disabled actors playing disabled characters (The Theory of Everything) and a film where a white person miraculously solves racism, while the real-life problems of serious issues are ignored (The Good Lie).

Wild, the new film from Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallee, is at face value another cynically produced awards-courting picture, the sort of “feel good” movie where you have to sit through two hours of relentless misery before getting to the happy ending. Yet, to dismiss it as this would mean missing something far more interesting, as it is not a completely unproblematic film.

Reese Witherspoon stars as Cheryl Strayed, from whose memoir the film is based. Following a messy divorce and losing her mother (Laura Dern, who steals every scene she’s in), Cheryl gradually turns into a walking unit of self-destruction, sleeping with everybody she sees and destroying her body with gratuitous substance abuse. She eventually decides that enough is enough and for reasons the plot never really makes clear, decides to walk 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail to heal herself (she clearly wasn’t hurting enough to trek the full 2,000+ mile journey).

Along the way she meets all kind of weird and wonderful characters that help reinforce her faith in the human condition and whose approaches to life help her become a better person, because this is awards season and that’s what the academy LOVES. The fact that she becomes a better person is neither a surprise nor a plot spoiler. The major surprise is how it manages to throw out all these oft-used tropes and still make an entertaining and emotionally engaging film.

A thrilling combination of great performances and excessive gore

Wild is nowhere near as good as the films it reminded me of, yet it approaches a similar story in a very different way from them. First, the most obvious comparison is to Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. Wild shares the same narrative structure, repeatedly cutting between home life and the wilderness in a way that lets each separate narrative stand on its own two feet, but also still complimenting one other. Though whereas that film embraced a love of nature even as the surroundings of the Alaskan wilderness grew increasingly hostile, Wild never seems to be a film about nature or the surroundings of the Pacific Crest Trail.

The “wild” of the title seems to instead be referring more to her home life than the wilderness, as anything approaching dramatic conflict on the trail seems to get brushed under the carpet mere seconds after happening, never to be mentioned again (yes hillbilly rapists, I’m looking at you). In the scenes set at home, every action has a consequence that informs the rest of the film without falling into the trap of “foreshadowing” real-life events. It happens in a way that seems like the product of a screenwriter’s imagination and not the biopic of a remarkable true story. The screenwriter in this case is High Fidelity author Nick Hornby, who is renowned for making melodramatic premises into something genuinely emotional.

It’s these home scenes that are the most engaging, and where Reese Witherspoon’s performance feels justifiably awards-worthy. One of the best elements of her performance is something that only occurs in the “wild” though, and that’s a healthy splattering of 127 Hours-style medical gore.  Witherspoon’s performance manages to sell the physical deterioration of her body without ever descending into histrionics. The movie opens with a squirm-inducing scene of Witherspoon ripping out a toenail after walking hundreds of miles in shoes we later learn are several sizes too small for her. Like 127 Hours, this is a movie about how the human spirit responds to the harsh realities of the wilderness, and it does so in brilliant, graphic detail.

But for me at least, the true knockout performance was Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother, who gives a performance so good it manages to overcome the fact that Witherspoon and Dern only have a nine year age difference in real life. Characters with terminal illnesses are another awards-baiting trope that turns my stomach every time I see them, but Dern underplays a role any other actress would dial up to eleven. This is a story arc tinged with tragedy, but Dern plays the role with subtlety, even as everyone around her descends into hysteria.

I was particularly moved by a brief conversation in which she tells her daughter that she always expected her to be a smarter and more successful person than she was, but she just didn’t expect it to hurt her as much as it did when it happened. As with most good movies, it’s the subtle moments that are the true emotional knock-outs.

Wild should be a strong tale of feminism – but it deals with its subject badly

Of course, in a film so broadly aiming for academy recognition, there are a plethora of Oscar-baiting moments that feel cynically included. Nick Hornby’s script manages to sell a ridiculous premise, yet it never believably answers the question as to why she goes on the journey of self-discovery in the first place. It makes the entire narrative feel like an engineered plot device to have Reese Witherspoon encounter every single element of the human condition in order to make the audience feel good about themselves.

The worst offender (apart from the almost-rape scene that has no repercussions on the plot that I don’t really want to discuss in any detail) is an unfunny comedy sequence in which she encounters a journalist from a magazine called “The Hobo Times.” In just one line of dialogue in this sequence, the movie undercuts itself. Up until this point, it was a boldly feminist tale of taking your life into your own hands, even if it means getting dirt under your fingernails. Then, Cheryl tells a journalist outright that she is a feminist, in a way that seems intended to generate a million think pieces on the movie’s feminist values.

Mainstream movies as disparate as Frozen, The Hunger Games and Gone Girl have shown feminist values without ever directly mentioning them, so as not to distract from the thrill of the movie itself. So why does an independent movie, where creativity is supposed to be stereotypically higher than at the studios, deal with the topic in such a heavy-handed way? In this instance, I blame director Jean Marc-Vallee.

I personally could not stand Dallas Buyers Club, his last movie, and felt that it was nothing more than a cynical bunch of Oscar-baiting elements paddled together. It’s a film where a real-life bisexual character is turned into a homophobe in the hopes of engaging homophobic audiences. In that film, every gay character is a ridiculous stereotype that is portrayed in a way that seems as if Vallee thought he was making an accurate representation of the gay community. It seems as if he thinks the same about feminism, drawing equally broad strokes that I can imagine many female viewers find patronizing (if not offensive like Dallas Buyers Club).

Conclusion

Despite all of these faults (and many, many more – I haven’t even touched on the soft-drink product placement), Wild engaged me on a purely emotional level. As we approach Oscar season and the movies being released become nothing more than “Oscar-bait-bingo,” shouldn’t we congratulate a movie that manages to take these elements and turn them into something that is still a thrill?

It doesn’t deserve any of the awards it will undoubtedly be nominated for, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve your time. It’s a heavy-handed mess that can’t find the right balance of grit and sentimentality, with its supposed feminist values clashing with patronizing approaches to topics such as sexual assault, among other things. Yet unlike Dallas Buyers Club, I truly believe its heart is in the right place. When it connects emotionally, the tears you will shed are well-earned.

Are you looking forward to seeing Wild? What do you think are its chances this award season?