Into the Wild Review
by Jonathan Moya (jjmoya1955 AT yahoo DOT com)October 8th, 2007
Into the Wild (2007)
A Movie Review by Jonathan Moya
Rating: B- or 3 out of 5 Stars
The Review:
There is a difference between a plain fool and a holy fool. A plain fool goes into the wilderness totally unprepared and dies. The holy fool lives to tell the tale as he hits you up for bus fare.
Chris McCandless spent nine weeks in 1992 living in an an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness and ended up starving to death. That just made him plain foolish. Jon Krakauer spent two years retracing McCandless odyssey, and retold Chris' story as that of an adventurer striving to achieve transcendence from the slough of human existence by living entirely off the grid. Krakauer's lushly detailed, lyrically told yet clear sighted Into the Wild was published in 1996, was short listed for a Pulitzer for nonfiction, and spent two years on The New York Times Best Seller list. McCandless, at last, had become a holy fool.
Sean Penn obviously felt a mystical communion with the details of McCandless' life since he spent ten years acquiring the movie rights. Krakauer had magnanimously reassigned the rights to McCandless' parents, and they were jealous guardians of their son's image.
The McCandlesses need not have fret. Into the Wild spends all of its time making Chris (Emile Hirsch) a saint- albeit a curiously self-absorbed, whiny and moody one, who has no respect or need for money or responsibility. The clear-eyed would call that being a spoiled brat. The mystics would rather let the overabundance of light scratch their corneas and watch the blurry images.
True, there is a lot of nice imagery on display here. The cinematographer was Eric Gautier, who knows how to soft sell his light. The Che Guevarra treatise The Motorcycle Diaries had a proletarian muddiness. Giant combines slicing through endless fields of wheat seem like an International Harvester product placement-- and the Alaskan wilderness of Danali National Park is shot with all the clear, cool, clean Rocky Mountain taste of a Coors commercial.
The appeal of the open road and the desire to strike out for the wilderness do have a magical appeal to most Americans. It is, after all, the mystic chord that keeps the Winnebago and Harley Davidson companies profitable. But McCandless did it in such a weirdly insanely adolescent way-- and mainly because his parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) sucked.
Chris and his sister were the byproduct of an ongoing affair that ended both his parents first marriage. Chris hated the fact that he was a technical bastard. Hated that his mom and dad were controlling parents fond of micromanaging every detail of his life and barely kept up a good front between their next big fight about God-knows-what. He hated their wealth and prestige.
Their offer of a new car as a graduation present is thrown back at them when it means that Chris must give up his beloved crappy yellow Nissan that he bought with his own money. His first real adult act is to secretly mail all the money his parents had budgeted for his first semester at law school to Oxfam, a charity-- and leave, without even a goodbye note.
>From then on, Sean Penn religiously strips Chris of all his material things. He burns the last of his money to stay warm. He loses his crappy car in a flash flood.
Alone, marginalized, and ecstatically happy, Chris depends on the kindness of the fringe dwelling mystics and dreamers that share his vision-- the on the road hippies in RV Parks, a grain farmer with a survivalist ethos but a fugitive's mystique, foreign tourists stranded in America and on a nature kick, a disillusioned old hermit coping with his own sorrow.
And Sean Penn mercilessly heaps on the last temptation of Chris nonsense. All the echoes of better family ties that need to be overcome and left behind, even his own potential fatherhood, are all treated as satanic whispers that keep him from that one big adventure and love he is destined for and can't wait to explore- himself. Logically, Alaska was the only place quiet enough where he could here himself think.
McCandless was a great admirer of other writers who went wild or found religion.
"Jack London is king", he says. A well thumbed through copy of "The Call of the Wild" is a frequent bedtime read. If Chris had read "To Build a Fire" instead, he still be alive.
"Walden" by Thoreau and the late letters of Leo Tolstoy come in for some curious sentence jumping and narration.
Even the mini biographies state that Thoreau never actually lived in the Walden woods. Thoreau idled his time in a self-built cabin on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson-- a cabin built around the shores of Walden Pond, located just outside of the edge of town and no more than a mile or so from his family home. It is easy to be self-reliant when mommy and daddy and doctors too are all right next door.
Tolstoy was born to aristocratic parents. He became religious only after a lifetime as a soldier and an author. When you have the money and the manservant's being an ascetic is easy.
Be prepared-- London, Thoreau, Tolstoy, even twelve year old boy scouts know that-- everyone except Chris McCandless, the "aesthetic adventurer" (Chris' term) that nature snidely eats, pisses and defecates out whole. Chris had no maps and only two handbooks on poisonous and edible plants. He died less than a mile from a patrolled walking bridge he never knew existed.
The march to martyrdom, the constant self-absorption loses some good performances in the journey.
Catherine Keneer turns in her usual nice work as the substitute earth mother and former flower child who spiritually adopts Chris.
Hal Holbrook as a widowed hermit and long time bereaving parent gives his greatest performance-- one that gets lost in the urgency of Penn to pound home the need for the disciple to teach the prophet true wisdom. After twenty minutes of honest bonding, Chris urges the wise sage up a steep and dangerous hill so he can see and experience the real truth for himself--- that the view is worth the journey. The old guy mutters some inaudible mystical babble, admires the sight of the sea for ten seconds, and then promptly stumbles down the hill muttering more mumbo-jumbo. Cue the annoying Eddie Vedder penned country homily to loud, when what really should be playing in the background is the full instrumental Fool On a Hill.
Wise as a fool can be McCandless finally makes it to Alaska where he promptly loses four notches on his belt, repeatedly screams his delight, kills food that rots before he can eat it, and completes his martyrdom by consuming a poisonous herb that he thought was edible. He dies staring into the sun, and watching the elevated camera trick that slowly raptures his soul to the clouds.
There is no questioning Sean Penn's ability as an actor, and even as a director he has talent. The Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard where small scale, tightly edited, dramas that had an honest emotional resonance. In Into the Wild Sean Penn just gets lost in his inability to see himself through the forest and the trees of his own ego. The question is can Penn can put aside the transgressions of this film and go back to being the egoless director he was? I hope so.
Into the Wild gets a not so civilized B-.
The Credits:
Directed by Sean Penn; written by Mr. Penn, based on the book by Jon Krakauer; director of photography, Eric Gautier; edited by Jay Cassidy; score by Michael Brook with songs and additional music by Eddie Vedder and Kaki King; production designer, Derek R. Hill; produced by Mr. Penn, Art Linson and Bill Pohlad; released by Paramount Vantage. Running time: 140 minutes.
WITH: Emile Hirsch (Christopher McCandless), Marcia Gay Harden (Billie McCandless), William Hurt (Walt McCandless), Jena Malone (Carine), Brian Dierker (Rainey), Catherine Keener (Jan Burres), Vince Vaughn (Wayne Westerberg), Kristen Stewart (Tracy) and Hal Holbrook (Ron Franz).
"Into the Wild" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity, brief nudity and some violent or otherwise upsetting scenes.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
