I realize that these critiques are adding more and more elements outside of what a straight ahead film review would be. I had planned a bit of that from the start. I wanted these to more about what I enjoyed personally than a stuffy academic dissection of what does and does not make a “good” film. Art is subjective, right? In addition to this approach I have also added the setting in which I approached these films, both physically as well as mentally. I feel these ingredients important to note as they help flavor the mind as it consumes and digests the media before it. Ever been in a great mood and have gone to see a comedy and laughed like you have never laughed before or been in a dour mood and every little thing in the movie bugs you more than usual or been in a hyper focused mood and felt every nuance of the film? Hopefully you are getting what I am saying.
We had a good turnout for this week’s movie, Wild. People were arriving close or late to the assigned meeting time and as the accumulating mass grew it became more sluggish and indecisive as groups are wont to do. Some of the more savvy members signaled it was time to head in but alas it was hard to get the entire group to move. A bunch of chatty Cathys that had turned into a stubborn grazing ox. I usually end up being one of the last in to the theater as I assist and shepherd newer members and wait for stragglers. I always have someone hold a seat for me but, as we had collectively entered the theater late, my location was going to be toward the back and the end of the row- not the ideal middle to upper middle location that achieves center vision and balance of sound. I felt a sting of bitterness at this as why am I to be punished, the one that gives lifeblood to these meetings? Well, as long as everyone is happy, I suppose, that is the role of a good host.
Now returning to the mood as I mentioned at the start of this topic. I am one that ideally likes to be in a near empty theater free of distracting noises and visually unimpeded by silhouetted heads of the patrons in front of me. If the movie is good and this environment is in play I can fade from reality and merge with the movie. For the first 30 minutes of Wild this was not going to happen. I can make an entire topic about loud pop corn eaters. There are the ones that straight up just open mouth chew loudly. There are the bucket rummages that instead of pinching an appropriate number of popped kernels from the bucket, instead claw and scrape and manhandle the snack that is more like a cross between a barnacle scrubbing and an adolescent boy trying to remove a bra than it is a function of eating. There are those that manage to eat loudly even with mouth closed. What is the vigorous chewing that can overtake the Dolby sound system of the theater? Are you a super villain? Besides the noise there is the constant commentator and his wife behind me. There is the shuffling of coats and bags. There is the conga line of those oafing their way to the bathroom.
Roughly 30 minutes in and things have settled enough that I can begin to engage with the film in earnest. I had not read the book and is likely that the book did a nice job of this, but I liked how the film took the mind and musings of the lead character and had the words, memories, and visions spill and segue into each other, scraps of reminiscences giving rise to other, perhaps negligibly related ghosts. I felt the film gave a good rendering of how we all do this in reality, not an easy task. Bits of clues here and there, feelings on the periphery of our mind that we occasionally send tendrils of neurons out to and tickle until the fragment blooms into a full blown memory.
I’m not a huge fan of Reese Witherspoon and her face and body made up of polygons nor am I huge fan of the kind of whorish woman that Witherspoon portrayed in this movie, the real life Cheryl Strayed. Boo hoo, your mom died. Moms and dads and children die and other bad stuff happens and it sucks, no reason to abandon your husband to be a heroin hazed skank with a revolving door for a vagina. Maybe I didn’t care for the character, maybe I would have been happy if her spirit fox decided to chomp on her face and leave her to become claimed by the frosts of winter. However I was interested in how a person could go about the quest of self-forgiveness and the physical task of the 90 day hike she undertook, a hike that even experienced hikers did not come close to fulfilling. The imperfectness of the character maybe did not make her an instant hero, but it made her relatable. Who among us has not felt shamed or less of a person and wished they could find a way to outrun those memories until they seem ashes from another life?
The ending of the film ended in a satisfying way. It told us what happened next without showing us every little detail dragging us through an anticlimactic prolog. We took the journey with Cheryl and after all those days she still had time to take a moment to let us know the final lesson and the definitive outcome.
If you like journey movies or personal quests, if you like movies about self-loathing and the eventual redemption to self-acceptance, if you like the peek inside the mind of another fully formed human being, a person that is inside all of us, check out this film.
Blarv score: 8.2 out of 10
The Potable Pictureshow 