If The Lord of the Rings trilogy taught us anything, it’s that watching people walk through the wilderness for hours on end can make for surprisingly good entertainment (it helps if there are epic battles along the way). If 127 Hours taught us anything, it’s that adding a true story element to a wilderness story also helps to add an extra layer of interest.
Reese Witherspoon is the next intrepid explorer to make a long journey with a big backpack in Wild, an adaptation of the memoir by Cheryl Strayed. Recently divorced and still reeling from the death of her mother four years previously, Cheryl decided to trek 1,100 miles alone across the Pacific Crest Trail, which spans nine mountain ranges between Mexico and Canada, in order to save herself from herself.
The new trailer for Wild reveals just how much Cheryl has to recover from while out on the trail. The trauma of her mother’s death triggers a descent into serial adultery and heroin addiction that ultimately breaks up her marriage. Looking at the trailer, it seems like the journey to finding herself again is going to involve a lot of sweat and blisters.
Wild has a lot of talent behind the camera, including director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) and screenwriter Nick Hornby, who penned the scripts for An Education and Fever Pitch, but is best known for novels like “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy.” Witherspoon herself recently starred in crime drama Devil’s Knot alongside Colin Firth and Dane DeHaan, and can soon be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice – another crime drama. It’s good that she got to take some time off from all that crime.
Does this trailer convince you that 1,100 miles across America with Reese Witherspoon will be a worthy journey? Tell us in the comments if you’re planning to see Wild in theaters later this year.
Wild is out in theaters on December 5th, 2014.
