Into the Wild
Studio: Paramount Vantage
Rated: R
Website: http://www.intothewild.com
Release Date: 2007-10-04
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener
Director: Sean Penn
WorkNameSort: Into the Wild
Our Rating: 5.00
As a director, Sean Penn has always been an impressionist. He would rather film the slow-burning atmosphere around his characters than the stories they inhabit. Too rooted in plot-driven genre scripts, his movies The Crossing Guard and The Pledge were never attuned to his abstract sensibilities, but he’s clearly found his home, his calling and consequently the best movie of his career in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling nonfiction book Into the Wild.
In chronicling Christopher McCandless’ willful transformation from moneyed college graduate to roaming vagabond on a penniless quest to Alaska, Penn turns Krakauer’s exhaustive journalism into pure cinema. While the narrative is strong, it works in glorious harmony with Penn’s free-form visual generosity. The first 20 minutes or so are filled with beautiful images of nature and there’s sparse exposition and dialogue, with shots that feel plucked from the cutting-room floor of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. This will drive some viewers mad, but they’re probably the same people who grow bored with long, descriptive literary passages.
An astonishing Emile Hirsch, channeling the looks and intensity of a young DiCaprio, portrays McCandless, the troubled grad who, rather than the follow his bourgeois parents’ (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) path into an Ivy League law school, decides to torch his money, abandon his car and all material possessions, and explore the American landscape on a journey to a symbolic Alaska. He encounters a couple of bus-driving hippie throwbacks (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), a pair of friendly Scandinavian tourists and a farmer who offers him work (an oddly cast Vince Vaughn). Backstory is revealed intermittently and elegantly through the narration of his sister back home (Jena Malone), and we gradually come to understand the psychological impetus for Christopher’s escape into a nut-and-berry-eating, hunting-and-gathering regression. Long but never rambling, the story eventually finds Christopher meeting up with a widowed old-timer (Hal Holbrook, surely a lock for Best Supporting Actor) with whom he bonds in tender and poignant scenes.
The movie’s tones and textures are so well-captured, the ambience so authentic and the performances so subtle and genuine that the characters’ emotions – euphoria, freedom, danger, nausea – become ours, in a poetically realized and harrowing vision of one man’s incompatibility with the modern world.
All of the movie’s potentially dubious tricks work: the way the gripping text from McCandless’ journal flows across the frame, making us hang on every word; the screenplay’s wise adages, exchanged not as false, homespun platitudes but the grizzled truth of lived experience; and the score by Eddie Vedder, whose normally agonizing warble becomes a mournful cry from the protagonist’s soul.
Penn is usually lumped in with the rest of show business’s “loony left,” but unlike the directorial efforts of fellow activists Tim Robbins and George Clooney, this film doesn’t suggest the work of an outspoken mouthpiece of liberal Hollywood. Rather, it feels like the latest masterpiece from an auteur whose interest in expanding the medium’s possibilities supersedes that of lecturing to his audience. In the ’70s, a film like this would be almost commonplace; today, it’s something like a miracle.
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2007.