The journey of a thousand miles begins with an oversized backpack and a boot thrown off a mountain. Or at least that’s how Wild begins, the adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir recounting her decision at 26 to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in an attempt to face the person she’d become. In the film’s opening scene, Cheryl—played with straightforward vulnerability by Reese Witherspoon—sits atop a mountain crest and sings a line from Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa”, her bloody and exposed foot reveals a toenail barely holding on. “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,” she whispers as she rips the toenail off, rocking backward in pain and incidentally knocking her boot off the mountain. So she takes the other boot off, throws it after its partner and screams in rage. And that’s Cheryl. One part sheer determination, two parts anger.

Wild falls into the same vein as other find-thyself-in-nature style movies, like Into the Wild, with a few of the same frustrations attached. Primarily the scenario of people facing nature with very little experience in naïve attempts to prove themselves. Oh, how nature loves to laugh at such people. It’s hard to be prepared for the harshness of the outdoors while navel-gazing ones way to personal peace and acceptance. I fully expected to find myself annoyed with Cheryl, but here is where director Jean-Marc Vallée proves his worth in his ability to take true-life characters with rough edges and paint them on to the screen in colors that attract and stir emotional identifiability.

Last year Vallée gave us Dallas Buyers Club, a remarkable bio-pic that earned Matthew McConaughey his first Oscar. The same grasp on perspective he offered last year on a feisty HIV survivor in 1980s Texas, he wields delicately in Wild.  The film doesn’t follow a clear line of action, allowing Cheryl’s journey to pull from her the pieces of her past that brought her to her present. In fact, much of the film is her daily routine. Packing up, hiking for miles alone, and setting up camp each night. As she hikes memories from her past surface giving us insight into not necessarily what led to her self-destructive behavior, but how at rock bottom a few months alone in the wilderness seemed as good a way as any to wipe a slate clean.

These memories include many of her mother Bobbi, who raised Cheryl and her brother on her own after escaping an abusive marriage. Bobbi is played by Laura Dern with an uninhibited sense of wonder and optimism that is never idealistic. Bobbi’s wisdom often comes back to her, her mother’s mantra pushing her forward, urging Cheryl to put herself “in the way of beauty.” The loss of her mother to cancer only a few years previous to her hike is clearly a pain she carries, but doesn’t seem to be the reason for Cheryl’s string of rash behavior, including habitually cheating on her seemingly wonderful husband (Thomas Sadoski) and falling in with heroin users. When her escapist behavior leads to an unwanted pregnancy—and the rare scenes we get with Gaby Hoffman as her best friend—Cheryl rashly attaches herself to the nearest wild idea in the form of a pamphlet for the PCT.

Both Witherspoon and Dern are likely to gain some much deserved awards recognition for their roles, especially impressive for Dern who doesn’t actually have that much screen time. But Witherspoon is the one who carries the film with the same fortitude she portrays hauling Cheryl’s comically huge backpack. Narration interspersed throughout the film with Cheryl’s complaints about her bruises, her food options, her varying levels of fatigue, and of course her emotional breakthroughs, are all inserted in an unobtrusive manner and spoken by Witherspoon with no hint of overt sentimentality.

With cinematographer Yves Bélanger on his side, Vallée certainly gets some exceptional footage of the PCT, but there’s hardly a nature shot that doesn’t place Cheryl squarely in the middle of it. The story is hers, and her setting, while gorgeous, is the static unchanging constant that provides her a way to focus in the midst of her tailspin. Nature is of course quite treacherous, but she faces each hardship with the determination that nothing could be more dangerous than the danger she poses herself. She encounters several people in her journey, some of them providing clear examples of the added pressure to be a single woman, vulnerable on the trail (not to mention in life). An interaction with two hunters in a scene in the woods is especially chilling. Nick Hornby adapted the novel for screen, and he excellently weaves Cheryl’s solitude, memories, and interactions along a wayward path, that while not always logical, helps prove Cheryl’s point that we aren’t only the sum of our experiences, in our ‘now’ we’re the interpretation of those experiences.

Wild is funny, harrowing, gritty, and should resonate with anyone who’s had any shred of self-doubt. Those looking for a survival tale will find a decidedly more contemplative story, where surviving one’s own condemnation proves at least equally as challenging as battling the elements.

As a woman who changed her last name to Strayed after her divorce as some sort of personal penance, Cheryl Strayed is clearly the sort of woman who would always need to be loud and explicitly honest about her transformation to feel complete in it. And so she must find it comforting to know her portrayal on-screen holds an amplifier to her story and universalizes it for anyone who’s needed to find their own freedom and the strength to accept themselves.

Our Bay Area readers will finally get a chance to see Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman in Crystal Fairy when it hits theaters tonight. We learned in our interview with director Sebastian Silva and Cera that the story about a wild group of friends who are on a quest to find magical psychedelic cactus San Pedro, was actually based on real life events. We noted that Crystal Fairy is a not drug movie per se, but rather a warm drama about the dynamics between an odd group of people embarking on a new experience in our review. If that is not enough to convince you to see the film, check out the trailer below.

Watch the official trailer for Crystal Fairy:

While stoned at a party in Chile, Jamie (Michael Cera), a boorish American asshole, invites a cosmo-tripping hippy named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman) on a quest with his friends to obtain San Pedro—a  “magical” cactus—and imbibe the mescaline-rich plant. Much to his surprise, Crystal Fairy actually shows up for the journey the next day. Feeling threatened by her weirdness (or something), Jamie slings nasty barbs and general douchiness in an attempt to drive her away, but their fellow road-trippers have taken quite a liking to her.

Cera and director Sebastian Silva chatted with us before the film’s screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival in May. We spoke about the film’s inception, the risk of improvisation, the real Crystal Fairy, whether Jamie is an asshole or not, their favorite road trip movies, and more.

Review of Crystal Fairy

How did the project get started? You were trying to get Magic Magic made, right?
Michael Cera: Right. We were basically sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for somebody to step in and finance Magic Magic. It seemed like that ship had sailed. We had given up. Then Sebastian said, “Why don’t we do this instead?” Just to make something, we’ll go make this movie and no one will stop us.

Sebastian Silva: I had Michael and Gaby there, so that was enough incentive for a Chilean producer to make a tiny movie that could finance itself just by international sales. It was a simple financial, economical figure and a good business idea.

Michael Cera: It was financially sound.

Sebastian Silva: Yeah, from every perspective. My friend’s producers were into it immediately and it was a very easy project to get going. Super easy. It took us, like, two weeks.

Because the film came together so quickly, how structured was the script?
Michael Cera: It was very structured. It was completely conceptualized and figured out.

Sebastian Silva: It’s based on a true story. I went through the same experience fourteen years ago with my best friend. We were going to go take San Pedro in the Chilean desert and I invited this hippy girl that I met at a concert. She was from San Francisco actually, and she went by the name of Crystal Fairy. We’re looking for her.

Michael Cera: We’re really hoping to find her. It just occurred to us today that maybe she’ll show up tonight*.

That would be amazing!
Michael Cera: It would be amazing!

Sebastian Silva: It would be fucking crazy. But anyways, that’s the structure—it actually happened. I would say about 80 percent of the things you see [in the film] are based on true facts. The fact that Jamie and Crystal are fighting so much—Jamie’s embarrassed of her and she’s so annoying—that’s kind of fictionalized. We actually got along with Crystal Fairy. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be looking for her and I probably wouldn’t name the movie after her! We had a very thorough outline, about 12 pages. It’s basically a screenplay without dialog. We knew some of the jokes. Gaby had some of her stuff written. I thought [some of her lines] were improvised, but I found out later that she memorized a lot of her speeches.

Let’s talk a bit about your character, Michael. Do you know anybody like that? You look…
Michael Cera: Awful! (laughs) I don’t know anyone that outwardly toxic off the top of my head, but I do know people who are that way with drugs. They like spouting their knowledge of the onset of LSD…people who have collected experiences in order to be an authority on something. That element was sort of inspired by real people. His terrible energy was inspired by the way the story was constructed. The whole thrust of the conflict in the movie is that he invites this woman [on a trip] and then unfairly turns on her when she takes him up on the invitation and makes her feel very unwanted and unwelcome. He actually tries to campaign against her, campaign to get her excommunicated from the group (laughs). It’s so unfair and so ugly. That’s the root of the character, that he’s so out of touch with himself that he can’t even take responsibility for his actions.

Sebastian Silva: I need to defend Jamie because I personally feel like it’s crazy…(trails off). If you’re all coked up at a party, all high and drunk, and you invite someone on a trip, you don’t expect them to call you! If you don’t pick up your phone, they don’t go! She’s kind of crazy [for going out there.]

Michael Cera: They’re both crazy.

Sebastian Silva: Jamie had a point. She’s embarrassing. The first thing they [see from her] is that she’s fighting a whole group of gypsies, she’s crying, she has no money. It’s a drag. It’s such a drag. The kid’s aren’t excited that you invited her. Champa (one of the guys on the trip) is like, “Are you serious? She’s going to come?” Jamie’s got a point. She’s pretty annoying.

Michael Cera: It’s really objective in that way. They’re both annoying (laughs).

Not having written dialog requires a measure of trust between the actor and director, right?
Michael Cera: I don’t think anyone had any feelings of doubt about whether we could do it or not. Gaby was expressing that she was a little nervous.

Sebastian Silva: She said she was really bad at improv, but she was an improve genius! I personally was more scared of my brothers (who act in the film) who had never acted. One of them had acted before…

Agustín
Sebastian Silva: Yeah, Agustín had acted before. Juan plays the second most important character after Jamie and Gaby. I was really scared for him. The first night he was nervous. You could see his veins really bulging. Luckily, the characters had done cocaine, so his tension was justified by the overuse of cocaine. The next morning he already felt more comfortable with the cameras and the crew and started pulling off an amazing performance. He was really good at improvising as well.

Michael Cera: They’re such present people. They could just sit there and have a conversation and not overdo it. They had really good instincts about what human beings are like. They’re all really intuitive. They played off of each other incredibly, too. It was really good for them to be doing those things with each other.

Sebastian Silva: In terms of the improv and the risk of it, for me, it was the inexperience of my brothers. But, that was solved the very first day of shooting. I was in one of the first talking scenes…

Michael Cera: You really set the tone with that. There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where we go into a bedroom and we’re doing cocaine and getting stoned. Sebastian is in there. He’s the guy who’s done San Pedro before. It was a good way to kick-start the entire experience.

I like that, when we arrive at the inevitable “trippin’ on San Pedro” scene, you don’t overdo it. The screen doesn’t get hazy, there aren’t crazy colors everywhere. You do some interesting things with the sound.
Sebastian Silva: It’s actually more of a panic attack than the effect of the drug. Any drug can give you a panic attack, right? Even marijuana can give you a panic attack. In that scene, we’re not really portraying the effects of mescaline. We’re portraying the effects of the sudden paranoia attack that Jamie gets from being so crazy. I never even thought that we would get all psychedelic and visual about it. It’s not that kind of movie.

Why isn’t it the right movie for that?
Sebastian Silva: The movie isn’t about the effects of mescaline. If you know about mescaline, [you know] it affects people differently. To make something visually would frame the experience in a weird way and not allow the audience to project their own experiences with recreational drugs onto the story. It felt like the wrong thing to do.

Michael Cera: It’s done often, too. I don’t think Sebastian ever falls into the trap of doing movie tropes. (To Sebastian) If you smell that, you try to do something different.

Sebastian Silva: Yeah, absolutely.

The film is kind of this odyssey, a journey across Chile for San Pedro. What’s your favorite road trip movie?
Sebastian Silva: Thelma and Louise! That’s a road trip film, right? I like that movie a lot. It made me want to be a woman and shoot men.

Michael Cera: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It makes you want to drive.

Sebastian Silva: That’s a fun one.

Michael Cera: Oh! Wild at Heart! It’s great.

Crystal Fairy opens in San Francisco Friday, July 19^th and is available now on demand.

* As far as we know, Crystal Fairy did not show up to the screening.

Crystal Fairy

Sebastián Silva just directed two Michael Cera features and at least one, Crystal Fairy, is bizarre and excellent. The story is rather simple, an American dick studies abroad in Chile in order to party and try the uber-psychedelic San Pedro, a cactus native to the Northern regions. Cera, his Chilian roommate, and brothers have a trip all planned out, but Cera sabotages their own intentions by trying to impress the groovy hippie chick, Crystal Fairy, at a party and drunkenly invites her along on their journey.

The beauty of Crystal Fairy evolves from the shifting group dynamic between Cera and the Chilian brothers, portrayed with honest naïveté by Silva’s three younger brothers and how it falters when Fairy joins them. Cera’s abrasive, insensitive American plays well against his established innocent persona, while feeling like a totally honest character. Gaby Hoffman’s fearless portrayal of the hypocritical hippie, Fairy, is something to behold. She literally bears all in a moving and disturbing performance.

The film weaves between a hipster comedy of manors, road trip, drug film, and honest drama but never settles long enough to get stale. Not much happens in Crystal Fairy, but its small character driven rewards feel like grand revelations. The excellent, yet sloppy cinematography and great music selection only elevate its already assured scenes. I’m eager to see this film again and to see Silva’s other Cera picture, Magic Magic, but I hear lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Monsters University

Pixar is dead. If the back-to-back of Cars 2 and Brave didn’t seal the deal, then Monsters University will. While the past two pictures were so obviously missteps, this one trips and plunges into the indiscernible Hollywood slurry. Monsters University gets under my fingernails like bamboo spikes because of its mediocrity.

Monsters University brings nothing new to the Monsters universe that was not already created in the excellent first film, yet seems fine with it as it skips along at a brisk pace. I found myself chuckling at a few of the lame jokes and was happy with the inclusion of Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Charlie Day as a wacky new monster. People of my generation (late 20s) grew up on Pixar in a way that we were young enough to be enchanted, but old enough to appreciate the new films and analytically follow their progression. It pains me to see a studio, who used to produce only amazing films, fall so far with only varying degrees of recent success. It seems that Pixar is now fine with producing the same old recycled crap, just with newer and better animation. Pour out a little Old E on the sidewalk. A giant has fallen.