well, if you really regret for what you have been, what you have done, what you have behaved, i mean, all bad in general, and you suddenly realized that your past is nothing but an ugly picture and bad memories; lot of drug abuse, random sex, bad manners/attitude to people around you, and you, of all the people in the world, suddenly want to change, to get some rehabilitation for your wrongdoing, without any second thought, you decide to punish yourself by walking out of where you live and failed so miserably, with a huge backpack that contained the basic necessity, to go somewhere else most on foot; your simple goal is to repent, to punish, to redeemed, to rediscover, to relieve yourself. what a stupid and naive way of thinking of yours! you think that to torture yourself by trudging 1,100 miles from the southern California to the northern Oregon or even further up to the north, from desert to high mountains, into the wildness, the coldness, the hunger, the bone-tired trekking and after that, you could find yourself and become a better person? are you kidding me? and on the way to rediscover yourself, to re-evaluate your miserable life, if there's chance to meet or encounter some dude, then you won't miss such luck to have some casual sex again like what you used to do in the past? does that look shallow and pretentious to yourself and to all the others? here, we got Witherspoon carrying a huge backpack all around, but it didn't look too much a burden to her. when she walked through the snowy mountain or trudging in the desert wildness, we never saw any deep footprints that should have appeared or left along her routes. her back never bent by the weight from the heavy load. this weightless backpack was just so fake and phony just like what we have seen in 'american sniper', the guy holding and hugging a lifeless dummy doll. the backpack and the dummy doll both just looked so obviously ridiculous funny. but somehow, the director might thought that making Witherspoon carrying a huge backpack was like Jesus Christ carrying a huge and heavy cross on his back, the torture symbolized the burden that Jesus Christ carried for the whole humankind. if it was what the director thought, then the huge backpack indeed was telling you something meaningful. otherwise, it's not only inappropriate, it just looked stupid.
if you really want to change, to rediscover yourself, to make a new you, you can always stay at home to achieve the same result in no time.
