Great movies surface during awards season, but my cynical side also notes that actors often take roles that they believe or hope will surface during awards season to capture those very awards.  Reese Witherspoon’s decision to make Wild seems to me to be a typical Oscar bait role.  Not that she doesn’t do her work; the tremendous physicality of walking up and down mountains with a mammoth pack on her back indicates how much she was willing to do for the role.  So too do her nude scenes, the first she has made since 1998’s Twilight.  But for all her bumps and bruises and lost toenails (an effect, I hope), I don’t really see what she sees in the material.

A young woman named Cheryl (Witherspoon) decides, for reasons which will never become completely clear, to walk the Pacific Crest trail from Mexico to Canada.  She is woefully unprepared for the rigors of the trip, and over prepared in terms of the equipment she brings.  She meets a few people along the way, while trying to sort through the wreckage that has become her life.  Eventually she finishes, and seems to find a new philosophy about living.

I like that Jean-Marc Vallée’s film dotes on the details of Cheryl’s trek, and how it mixes quick-cut flashes of her life into the long silences of her walk.  Eventually the flashbacks become the dominant motif, as Cheryl mourns the loss of her mother (Laura Dern) and the disintegration of her marriage.  But that is where the film fails to move me: we get to understand who Cheryl is when she begins the trip, out of a personal desperation to save herself — but I never understood how Cheryl became such a train wreck in the first place.  She is seen screwing around and doing drugs and arguing with husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski), but I still don’t know why she was so unhappy.  And then at the end, when Cheryl reaches the Bridge of the Gods, she mumbles some psychological stuff about forgiving herself and the movie ends.  For me, Cheryl’s conversion “from lost to found,” as the tagline reads, is artificial and not particularly convincing.

Life is messy, and often we aren’t even aware of why we do what we do.  But this is a movie, one which at least attempts to offer clues to such enigmas.  I don’t think the movie is well written enough to justify the commitment of time and bonding to the character.  It’s not a bad movie, it just isn’t developed enough.  The enigma of Cheryl Strayed (the surname she chose after divorcing her husband) remains long after the primitive beauty, relentless challenge and fork-in-the-road moments of her adventure have passed.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  9 January 2015.