Telluride at Dartmouth: "Wild"
Based on the best-selling memoir, Wild follows a lost and broken woman (Reese Witherspoon) who undertakes a solo 1100-mile hike to salvation.
Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) suffered a painful divorce, the abrupt death of her 45-year-old mother (Laura Dern) and a period of promiscuity and drug use. At the edge of homelessness, she decides to hike the 1100-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Oregon. Solo. Novelist-screenwriter Nick Hornby and director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) adapt Strayed’s acclaimed, best-selling memoir into a passionate, funny and involving cinematic journey. Witherspoon is superbly unsentimental and gutsy in rendering the inner battle between self-destructive impulses and her will to survive. Equally powerful are her encounters with veteran hikers, granola freaks and the most ordinary of ordinary people, each a reminder of the restlessness of the human soul. (US, 2014, 120m) Courtesy of Fox Searchlight
