Walk on the mild side: why Wild and Tracks turn the wilderness into a walk in the park

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/28/walk-on-the-mild-side-wild-wilderness-movies

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How wild is Wild? The new Reese Witherspoon vehicle is based on a memoir by Cheryl Strayed, who hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada, in an attempt to put some distance between herself and her heroin addiction, and to come to terms with the death of her mother. The film version of her 1995 trek opens with Witherspoon yanking a bloody toenail off her mangled foot, accidentally knocking one of her boots down a sheer mountainside, and screaming obscenities across a valley. Pretty extreme stuff, then. You can see why Witherspoon is being tipped for an Oscar.

Up to a point, anyway. After a while, you may find yourself asking whether Strayed is really testing the limits of her endurance, or whether Wild is simply a film about an exhilarating nature ramble – ie, not very wild at all. Anyone who changes their surname to Strayed is obviously not averse to self-mythologising. But the fact is, our hero isn’t conquering Everest or hacking through uncharted jungle. She’s striding along a National Scenic Trail, with a guidebook in her rucksack and signposts to stop her getting lost. The route also has well-appointed campsites, where Cheryl collects packages her friends have sent her, and enjoys a refreshing bottle of her favourite soft drink – one thing the film is wild about is product placement. And, however tough the going may get, Cheryl still has plenty of time to sit and read poetry, thereby allowing Witherspoon to do the cute little frown of concentration that was so funny in Election and Legally Blonde, but which we’re supposed to take seriously in Wild.

So what’s the big deal? The film undoubtedly works as an advert for the California countryside, but not much else. Wild, like its central character, is pootling along a well-worn path: the middlebrow drama adapted from a plotless non-fiction book about a therapeutic hiking holiday. This year, we’ve already had Tracks, in which Mia Wasikowska plays a woman who tramps 1,700 miles across Australia with four camels and a dog for company. Like Wild, it’s based on a memoir, by Robyn Davidson, and it’s a lot stronger on scenery than story. In 2010, we had The Way, written and directed by Emilio Estevez, and starring his dad, Martin Sheen, as a man who walks through Europe on a traditional pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Estevez fictionalised the source material in order to give Sheen’s character a bereavement to match Strayed’s, but the film is actually an adaptation of another memoir, Jack Hitt’s Off the Road.

Covering even more ground, Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black were in The Big Year in 2011, playing three twitchers who race around the US competing to see who can tick off the most birds in a year. Again, the film is fictionalised – although not enough to include any jokes or twists – but it’s based on a factual account by a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Mark Obmascik. Another journalist to get in on the act is Elizabeth Gilbert. She went travelling for a year after her marriage broke down. She didn’t just bag a new husband, but a memoir and a Julia Roberts movie, 2010’s Eat Pray Love.

These sightseeing, navel-gazing projects have a few traits in common. They leave the impression, in some cases, that the writers were thinking less about spiritual enlightenment than a hefty publishing deal: Gilbert’s expedition was funded by a $200,000 advance. The books themselves tend to be Oprah-endorsed bestsellers with short, catchy titles and long, uncatchy subtitles (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail; Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route Into Spain; Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia). And, crucially, there’s nothing more at stake for any of the writers than there was for Tony Hawks when he hitchhiked around Ireland with a fridge.

After all, what would have happened if Strayed hadn’t made it to the end? What if Hitt hadn’t reached Santiago, or if Gilbert had managed the eating and the praying, but hadn’t got as far as the loving? They might not have got a book out of their experiences, but how else would their failures have mattered? Besides, the outcomes of their respective journeys were hardly in doubt – which is another reason why the subsequent films are so unsatisfying. Where is the jeopardy that should have us on the edge of our seats? Where is Cheryl’s peril?

I’m not saying every non-fiction character who heads to the great outdoors should attend an impromptu banjo duel before being hounded through the woods by armed inbred rednecks, as happens in John Boorman’s harrowing 1972 film Deliverance. Or get eaten by sharks, like the abandoned divers in 2003’s Open Water. But some bona fide danger can certainly help to differentiate a film from an envy-making series of Facebook posts about a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Take the travellers in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Both of them wandered a long way off the tourist trail in the Alaskan wilderness, and neither knew when they would return to civilisation. In fact, neither of them did. In Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, Aron Ralston, played by James Franco, has to hack his arm off to escape Utah’s Blue John Canyon. And in Kevin Macdonald’s semi-dramatised documentary Touching the Void, Joe Simpson has to worm his way out of a crevasse and down the Siula Grande in Peru with a smashed leg. Next to that, Strayed’s toenail removal (her boots were too tight) doesn’t seem so bad.

Still, even Touching the Void, Grizzly Man, Into the Wild and 127 Hours can leave you with the niggling feeling that they’re not about epic adventures so much as glorified Outward Bound courses. As hazardous as the situations may be, the characters got into them for their own amusement: Ralston’s al fresco surgery may have been mind-boggling, but whose fault was it he decided to go canyon-hopping without telling anyone? Into the Wild, meanwhile, is far better than its near-namesake Wild, but it carries the same patchouli-scented whiff of neo-hippy 1990s self-indulgence: like Cheryl Strayed, its hero awards himself a grandiose new name, Alexander Supertramp.

The point is that when the protagonists of these films lace up their hiking boots (ill-fitting or otherwise), they’re not doing so for the good of mankind, or even the good of one other person. Their only goal is to cheer themselves up, and they’re fortunate enough to have the resources and the time to do it. What’s worse is that they see their majestic surroundings as a medicine that exists solely to treat their psychological ailments. They’re looking at mountains and forests, but they’re thinking of themselves.

• Wild is out in the UK on 16 January, Australia on 22 January, and in the US on 5 December