![]() ![]() The suggestion of sex at the start is part of the movie’s candid tone. Sweating and freezing, Cheryl wants to expunge loss and self-disgust from her soul. Each stopping place in the wilderness is a kind of marker along the road to redemption. ![]() In 1995, she walked eleven hundred miles, through desert, bush, and snowy mountains, from Mojave, California, to the Oregon-Washington border. Her mother died in 1991, and Strayed, grief-stricken and lost, cheated on her devoted husband (played by Thomas Sadoski in the film), and, with one lover, fell into a heroin haze. “Wild” is based on Strayed’s autobiographical best-seller, published in 2012, seventeen years after her arduous trek, which she reconstructed in punishing and exhilarating detail. One of the boots falls into a canyon, and, with a curse, she throws the other after it. When she gets there, she takes off her too-small boots, to reveal blackened toenails that are painfully loose. The woman, however, turns out to be a hiker, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), with a huge pack on her back, laboring to reach an exposed high place. ![]() “Wild” opens with a shot of majestic forested mountains and the sound of a woman breathing harder and harder, as if in sexual excitement. ![]()
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