In a World So Troubled...
Sean Penn’s film adaptation of “Into the Wild” offers a different sort of escapism.
By Michael Gottwald, Wesleyan University
September 24, 2007
Paramount/Vantage
If college ever seems exhausting, constrained, meaningless, dull, or depressing, I warn you: Do not see “Into the Wild.” You might very well be inspired to give up everything you ever thought was worth anything and live in an abandoned bus in Alaska.
“Into the Wild,” based on the 1996 Jon Krakauer book of the same title, is based on the true story of a young man who did just that. After graduating from Emory University, 22-year-old Christopher McCandless quietly embarks on a personal quest to break entirely from all the external obligations of his life: his family, his friends, and civilization at large. With a head full of Henry David Thoreau and a hiking pack on his back, he hits the road, donating the $24,000 he had told his parents was for Harvard Law School to OxFam instead. A flash flood in the Arizona desert destroys his car, and the next morning he burns the rest of his cash, cutting his final material ties to his old life.
For the next two years, McCandless—played with the requisite charm and guile by Emile Hirsch—walks, hikes, canoes, kayaks, and bums a ride across the American West. He encounters many colorful characters: an aging hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker) struggling with the autumn of their union, an itinerant folk-pixie wielding a guitar and a mean crush on McCandless (Kristen Stewart), and a grandfatherly semi-retiree still forlorn over the loss of his family half a century ago (Hal Holbrook). When Chris needs money, he works—on a farm in the Dakotas with hard-drinking, fast-talking Wayne (a perfectly cast Vince Vaughn), or in a fast food franchise in the dimly lit badlands of outer Los Angeles. He decides on the wilds of Alaska as his terminal haven, where he can reach the apex of his mission for truth and beauty.
Given that “Into the Wild” focuses on a man’s journey from a comfortable life into the rugged beauty of America’s wilderness, you’d imagine the film would be characterized by lush, sprawling, pristinely mounted landscape shots in which man appears humble and nature supreme. Instead, director Sean Penn keeps the frame tight on McCandless, recognizing that this is his story. Only through our protagonist’s highly particular point of view do we see the magnificence of the world around him. Through slow-motion interludes, unbridled editing, and some playfully self-reflective scenes of Hirsch making faces at the camera, Penn’s film is endowed with the free-spirited nature of its subject.
While “Into the Wild” does have its own sort of beauty, truth is a little harder to find. If you still find yourself maddened by the thought of some self-righteous privileged kid playing Buddha and reading Boris Pasternak between jumping free rides in freight trains, you’re not alone. Indeed, as Penn introduces us to McCandless, cutting back and forth between his sudden departure from Atlanta and his last fateful weeks in Alaska, it’s hard to get a handle on someone who has taken such brash action. Subsequently, with voiceovers from both McCandless and his sister, the narration of Christopher’s letters to Wayne, the text of said letters imposed on screen, and the division of the movie into “chapters” reflecting the cycle of life, the film can feel a bit too eager to justify its hero through analysis.
Yet it works—sort of. McCandless’ sister (Jena Malone) aptly navigates the fractured narrative by gradually filling us in on the troubled back story of the McCandless family: the infidelity of her father (William Hurt), the sorrow of her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), and, by extension, all that Chris is running from. We’re slowly seduced into seeing the world as he does, treasuring his solitary adventure all the more.
On his journey, would-be family member after family member is left in his wake, pining for a more permanent connection to this charismatic nomad, but recognizing the futility in trying to stop him. By the time he leaves loveable grump Hal Holbrook alone and bleary-eyed on the side of the road, that thing in our throat begs us to question again the rigid selfishness of Chris’s quest—only this time it’s out of love, not a lack of sympathy. We want to tell him that maybe the meaning of life has something to do with other people. Then we watch helplessly as McCandless is doomed to arrive at this truth a bit too late to save his own life.
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