Wild (2014) - You Ready For It?

★★★☆☆

It’s weird that ‘Wild’ doesn’t seem to move or engross a bit until the last few minutes where all the emotion and sentiment start to break out when a little boy sings Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon) a beautiful song that reminds her in a sense of the purpose of her solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. All those frequent flashbacks in the film revealing Cheryl’s bittersweet past and the reasons why she’s doing it seem pretty mundane to me after all, but the last few moments of it almost make me want to cry. I don’t know. Maybe it sets me up so well. Maybe I finally get to feel her pain and grief as I know I’ll have to face some of her problems as well later in my life!

You may not get to know what’s really going on there at first, but you’ll sure pick up piece by piece on condition that you’re patient and tolerant enough of the non-happening in most parts. This is a film about the unbearable pain of having to let part of yourself go; of seeking forgiveness and redemption that you don’t think you deserve anyway; of having no choice but to flow with life itself. I don’t know what I would do if I lost the one I love now. Would I see what the Buddha says, and be strong and move on? Or would I drown in grief, and lose myself and be destroyed eventually? Would I feel like self-redemption is the hardest thing to find in the world like Cheryl does in the film? I don’t think about that, but I know I’ll lose someone important to me no matter what. That the sooner I get ready for it, the better!

‘How wild it was to let it be’. That’s the last thing Reese’s Cheryl said. I guess we all need to be wild sometimes. So is Reese ‘wild’ enough to be able to grab an Academy Award this year? Well, I don’t think so!