9/10 – A woman approaches a fork in the road at the crossroads of her life in this autobiographical tale. With the crumbling status of her marriage and the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) has lost all hope. After years of reckless, destructive behavior, she makes a rash decision. With absolutely no experience, driven only by sheer determination, Cheryl hikes more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. “Wild” was every bit as emotionally moving as it was powerfully intense. There is so much i enjoyed about this film that the review practically writes itself. It is helmed by the best female leading performance i have seen in 2014. Make no mistakes about it, Reese Witherspoon becomes Cheryl in this film. Her character left me spellbound because i didn’t receive just one performance from her, i received a couple that hit me in different emotional facets. I loved Cheryl because i saw a determined person’s search throughout this long journey to find the woman her mother raised. Her relationship to her mother (Laura Dern) is something i related to so much that it tugged at my heartstrings when Cheryl’s life feels worthless without her. I hated Cheryl because of the terrible decisions she made that hurt the only people she had in her life. I felt sorry for Cheryl because the film captures her loneliness on this journey as miniscule when compared to her life at home. This journey is about starting over, and that starts with facing the monster she created in the mirror. Reese gives the rawest performance of her career. It’s clear that she did her homework on the frail Strayed as she serves as a producer on the film as well. Many people will view the nudity scenes she does in the film as disappointing, but i think it was important to show just how far her life had fallen. Her sex scenes come across as hard to watch because that is what we as an audience are supposed to feel as she gives herself to several men in the name of infidelity. The camera angles are breathtaking in the film. Many wide angle shots support the statement of just how alone this woman is. That loneliness takes on many forms throughout the film, boredom, pain, fear, and delirium to name a few. It’s in each of these emotions that Cheryl grows as a person, and it becomes a clear portrait of a battle tested woman by film’s end. My favorite thing about the film however, was the wonderful editing job on so many symbolic flashbacks. The film has two stories to tell in Cheryl’s life, past and present, but it never feels like the movie is overcrowded for it’s 1 hour and 50 minute run time. Instead, the script takes it’s time giving you short flashbacks one at a time and making you search for the ending. Many scenes like this in other films will sometimes beat the viewer over the head with the answer they are trying to convey, but i think some of the events past in “Wild” will require multiple viewings while pushing to get the most from the viewer. I searched and searched for something i didn’t like about the film, and with the exception of some events that pop up out of nowhere, i couldn’t find anything. Those pop ups gave me a minor bother because they sometimes feel out of place with a previous scene, but i can ignore this because it’s based off of real life events from the literary biography. Director Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club) hits a homerun again with uncut emotional depth and a journey that the viewer takes physically and psychologically with Strayed. “Wild” is a film that can’t be missed by anyone. The biggest message of all is perhaps that every obstacle in front of us begins with one foot at a time.