| Posted by: Alric Knebel at March 15, 2008, 2:03 pm | | Topic: INTO THE WILD Forum: groupsrv | I saw INTO THE WILD for two reasons. First, I saw that tearful clip of Hal Holbrook on the Oscar show. Second, I trust Sean Penn. He's a conscientious man in all areas of his life, from his politics to his art, probably believing that there really is such a thing as a higher consciousness (a view I share), and it's the moral duty of every conscientious human being to seek it. But there's ANOTHER another side of his personality that comes from street-smart toughness. Ignorant as I was of the source material, from which Penn wrote the screenplay, I assumed from the TITLE of the film that it would bear the imprint of the darker side of his personality. Instead, it was a film about sacrificing everything else for spiritual truths. For some reason, at the beginning of the film, upon meeting the central character Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsh), I was unable to connect to his spiritual and emotional woes. For one, I wasn't sure what his motivation was for this spiritual search, and that he might be sublimating his familial dysfunction immediately undermined its noble intent. So it was, like, youthful angst redux redux; been there, done that. For another, there's a thin line between adamantine idealism and mental illness; so there's that. What saved the film for me was that I simply chose to accept him as motivated by his hunger for higher truths, ignoring whatever syndrome lay beneath it. But it was a choice I had to make at some point, to buy into the image Chris created for himself, a decision I made as self-consciously as his taking on the last name "Supertramp." With all of this going on in my head, it's clear that I was engaged in the content. However, I don't think I was getting out of it what Penn wanted me to get. With the central character having so much screen time, the lack of empathy left me disconnected for a greater part of the film. Chris pauses at one point to cite an ode to an apple that was totally superfluous, and seemed thrown in to make an otherwise simpler story longer. I had already embraced the point, long BEFORE the paean. As a person who's answered the big questions for myself as best I can, I comprehended Chris's idealistic drive on an intellectual level, but was mostly uninterested. With that, what was left for me to appreciate? It was through his parents that I felt anything at all. As a father of a son now around Chris's age, I felt deeply sorry for Chris's parents, Walt and Billie McCandless, played with convincing ease by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden. Walt has the place in the family tableau as the bad guy, but Hurt's deft but brief performance made me feel who he was. When Walt redeems himself, I'm happy to forgive him. The problem is, we don't really spend that much time with them. With Hal Holbrook's Ron Franz either, another character who elicited a tear or two. INTO THE WILD feels like a road movie in which Chris is dispensed wisdom, and in turn dispenses it; he's touched, and he touches others; and so forth and so on. At times, I was reminded of HARRY AND TONTO. Other times, I thought also of EASY RIDER, minus the mary jane. They're similar to INTO THE WILD because we can analyze life as a landscape, and mostly what we can see from a freeway and its rest areas. We weigh beautiful people and brutal people, and we're encouraged to believe beauty tips the scale. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking this movie succeeded in doing that far better than those other movies, and better than my initial reaction suggested. There's an afterglow that is warm, though probably not everlasting. The problem is, this was a long movie relative to the type of material it is, and it wasn't until the last half hour that poignancy sweetened the experience and made it worth while. Fortunately, epiphany and reconciliation dovetails in a satisfying manner, and had it not ended the way it did, I don't think it would have been very interesting. Not from the perspective of a middle-aged man, anyway. My score: 3.5/5 --
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Alric Knebel http://www.ironeyefortress.com/C-SPAN_loon.html http://www.ironeyefortress.com |
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