Wild

Grade: B-

In the mid 1990s, a woman named Cheryl Strayed had just lost her mother to cancer, and found herself divorced. She was lost and at rock bottom, so she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail over the course of roughly 3 months. She wrote a novel about her travel, called Wild, and it is now a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern, both nominated for Oscars tonight. I read Wild before watching the film, and thought it a splendid idea to take all this beautiful invigorating imagery of the great and not-so-great outdoors and bring it to the big screen. Witherspoon (as Cheryl) has long been a celebrity crush of mine, and she is a powerful presence here, and Dern plays her mother, and gets to make quite an impression despite only being seen in flashbacks. Having read Wild beforehand, as is usually the case, I found the movie to be fine, but an inferior shell of the book, where some of my favorite parts were not seen in the film. Maybe this could spark a discussion: which is better to experience first – book or movie? I’ve had the reverse of this, where I saw the movie and then read the novel, and it has been quite pleasurable. Obviously, I loved the work enough to want to read it, and reading it expands the story for me even more, and fills in so many blanks. I can see advantages to both. One constant thought I have upon first reading then viewing remains the same. “The stakes were so much higher in the book.”

Grade: B-