Dreadfully Boring

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The film had its interesting moments but Witherspoon's horrible character she portrayed and the many flashbacks got in the way and interrupted the movie's flow. I found myself just not caring, liking or sympathizing with Witherspoon's character in the least. I mean, many people have rough, tragic lives but we all don't go off the deep end and become drug-addicted, foul mouthed, adulterous, disrespectful, promiscuous sluts. There is nothing noble or overcoming about this movie. It's a story about an unlikeable, mentally dysfunctional woman trying to resolve her problems by taking a hike. Instead of wasting 2 hours on this dog, I should have taken a hike away from my TV.

I'm accustomed to seeing Reese Witherspoon in lighter fare than this. She's generally pretty good in that kind of stuff, but just the genre itself means that she's never really ranked in what I would call my "A" list of actresses. But my appreciation of her talent increased immensely when I saw her in "Wild." She carries this movie on her back just as much as her character carries her heavy backpack throughout most of the movie. She's in pretty much every scene, so nothing really happens without her, and she's excellent. With all due respect to Julianne Moore, Witherspoon probably should have won the Oscar for best actress that year, and why "Wild" did not even earn an Oscar nomination is beyond me. I'm aware that Cheryl Strayed (on whose memoir this movie is based) said that it was a case of sexism - suggesting that because the movie was based on a woman's experience it didn't get the respect it deserved. Whether that's true or not I have no idea, but overlooking the movie was a huge and sad oversight.As Strayed, Witherspoon was portraying a very troubled young woman dealing with a whole lot of demons in her life - an abusive father, a loving mother who died far too young, a failed marriage. All those things led to drug addictions and sexual promiscuity and eventually an unwanted pregnancy until Cheryl finally decides to basically find herself and get her life back together by committing to hike about 1000 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail - in spite of the fact that as far as hiking goes she's completely inexperienced and totally unprepared. The movie does a superb job of following her along the trail, recounting some of the experiences she has along the way. You expect her to encounter trouble, but although some of her experiences are (or seem) threatening, nothing really bad ever happens to Cheryl, and for the most part she meets a lot of really nice people along the way. It's more a case of the mood that gets set along the way. In fact, most of what happens on the Trail is so unexciting that I can't even call them adventures - and so I use the word "experiences." But the story isn't so much about the Trail or what happens to her - it's about a journey of self-discovery; a journey that helps her come to terms with who she is and where she's been and - just maybe - where she's going. Director Jean-Marc Vallee, I thought, did a great job of moving forward a story that wasn't really "exciting" but keeping it interesting all the way through. The movie intersperses the story of Cheryl's hike, with her backstory, through flashbacks as far back as her childhood and up into her troubled adulthood after her mother's death, and these flashbacks certainly help us to understand how Cheryl got to the point where she needed to do something to re-centre her life. I'm not sure that, in similar circumstances, I'd choose a 1000 mile hike - but she did, and it seemed to work for her.There's really not much to criticize here. The ending may be a little bit rushed - this was a rare movie that left me thinking that maybe there could have been just a bit more? But, overall, I was really impressed with this. In some respects it reminded me a little bit of the 1999 movie "The Straight Story." I wasn't sure that a movie about a woman going on a long hike would be able to keep me interested for almost two hours. But it did. (9/10)

Oh yeah, I forgot....didn't pay attention when I chose to watch this....the warning sign was there all along...a film with Laura Dern in it. This tale, whether based on real story or not, is true 100% crap. Music choices were OK though but not featured enough to soothe the pain of having to sit through the disjointed dysfunction stuff. The main character Cheryl seems incapable of learning anything or making sense of anything that happens in her life. I presume she's a stream of consciousness kind of person who is so off in cloud cuckoo-land that practicalities are anathema. There's no entertainment or education to be found here. The Hornby treatment is perhaps novel but not enough to warrant this dire waste of your time.

When the credits rolled I asked myself: "Why have I just watched this film"? A young woman soul-searching after her mother's death ... OK, so Reese Witherspoon is very pretty, but it had to be more than that, and so it was. I think it helps that I backpacked myself - meeting a wide variety of eccentric characters in my journeys(but without the sex, unfortunately). I empathised with Cheryl; enjoyed the score and the cinematography. Plus, there was a bit of feel-good factor towards the end ... and what is wrong with that?