Alma salvaje

An arduous journey across America on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed tests her tenacity to continue forward till the end. There's very little else to the story, which makes this film really powerful. With not much else other than a tedious walk and a vampish past the story bobs back and forth between the present and the past revealing how Cheryl finds herself in such a circumstance and why she cant stop until she is finished.

At first Cheryl seems like a woman unable to let go of her now ex-husband, beginning a journey with more baggage than is necessary. It might almost be easy to throw this story into the bin of sappy chick-flicks when that inability to get closure on a relationships end is actually fronting as more of an act of remorse and regret. She messed up. And there is no way to repair the damage without an ugly scar.

The further she goes the more she dives into the series of events that lead her to such a devastating circumstance of sex and drugs. The loss of her mother is far too much for her to feel. The depth of such pain can sometimes strip a human being from feeling anything at all. The tears flow from her face but those tears are not falling for grief, they drop from the overwhelming numbing the death has caused.

Cheryl's emotions are lost in a wild and desolate space that is pain and grief, which is so perfectly mirrored with the vast, open landscape she is now physically wondering through. And both her emotions and the land are the same: it wont change immediately and things will be tough but if one keeps going forward one will come out of it. And better for it. Cheryl just needed that physical aspect to make the connection with her emotions. The self-loathing and destructive life she was living was the equivalence of her just lying down on the sandy path and dying right there.

It's a fairly event-less film where a woman just goes through some fairly tough terrain but somehow the flashes to her past spliced in with the turmoil of her present moves the story along swimmingly.

If you're a fan of deeply emotional story lines this one might very well be worth the watch.