Pacific Crest Trail, National Scenic Trail

Photo by daveynin 

 At some point, or several in fact, we mess up pretty bad. We were responsible, happy, hard-working, and faithful people, the ideal of what a human being should be like. Then things happen, inevitable things that are beyond our control and before we know it we don’t recognize ourselves anymore. We do things we never thought of doing, having sex with strangers, doing all the drugs we can find, drinking all the liquor in every bar; leading us to ask: What happened to me? When did I become such a mess? We’ve all hit rock bottom and regardless of how stupid it may sound to the normal careless people, sometimes all we need is a pause. A moment where we don’t have to face our problems directly, be on our own and scream to the heavens if we have to allowing our inner volcano to erupt all over the land we stand on. It’s a difficult process but at some point we need to blow up, were walking time bombs just waiting for the great explosion. The following movie is about this exactly, getting away from everything you know, losing yourself in an unknown place to find yourself once more.

I heard about this movie from my INF-103 professor and I felt it was interesting, even found out it was based on an autobiographical novel by Cheryl Strayed who went through a journey of self-discovery while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada) after having lost everything dear to her.

The film shows is Cheryl’s (Reese Witherspoon) journey through her hike along with all of the things that went wrong previously in her life, all going back to the death of the person she loved the most in the world: her mother. After her mother died from a cancerous tumor on her spine, Cheryl’s world falls apart and she is no longer the strong woman her mother inspired her to be. Instead she begins to use heroin and sleeping with many strange men all while being married to her college sweetheart. Obviously she was trying to fill this emptiness inside her, but sadly it made everything worse. Though she loathed the hike at first, asking herself why she had decided to do such a thing and reminding herself of all the things she missed, it gives her time to face her past. She remembers her childhood, how her mom was always happy regardless of the abusive husband she previously had (Cheryl’s stepfather), how she tried so hard to be good mother to Cheryl and her brother, and about who unfair her death was. At the same time she overcomes the woman she was, becoming stronger in every step and learning to take care of herself once more. She overcomes the desert heat, foot pain, hunger, thirst, the snow and even losing toe nails to finally let out all of the emotions inside of her.  It’s pretty amazing how she managed to complete the whole trail without any previous backpacking experience, it gives viewers a pinch of hope and confidence of overcoming anything because at the end of the day your biggest obstacle is yourself. The mind is powerful indeed it all depends from the attitude and perspective you decide to give things, only when you practice positive thinking and work hard for what you want can you truly feel in control. The lesson behind all this is that there will be a lot of moments beyond our control, we will lose many people we love, but we shouldn’t lose ourselves through harmful behavior and if we do we must try to find our way back around; or at least find a better bath for ourselves.

Ever since Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon has been my favorite actress she just has something very charming about her and by watching this film I don’t think there’s a role she can’t play. She did a great job playing Cheryl (she also helped make it under her production company Pacific Standard), made me actually sympathize with her and feel very identified. There are many moments of my life lately where I would just take a backpack, climb up the tallest mountain to get away from everything at least for a while. It was a fun experience to ”hike” along with Cheryl on her journey and at the same time getting an idea of what hiking involves (hunger, lack of hygiene, pain, thirst, etc), while giving us a taste of nature in all its forms. Great movie, I would definitely watch it again for those moments I feel lost and in need of acknowledging all of the things bottled up inside.  Made me want to try hiking as well (maybe when I build some endurance we’ll see what happens).

The film was nominated for many awards but it only managed to win the Location Managers Guild Award for Outstanding Locations in Contemporary Film (duh, of course it did! It earned it). It may have not won many awards but it did win the respect of many people and it help the real Cheryl Strayed realize that in some way we are all connected through our experiences. Hopefully I will read the book as well which was also featured in Oprah’s book club.

Hope you enjoyed this review, I know it wasn’t amazing but as long as I activated your curiosity for this movie that means I did something right. Write to you soon!