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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Into the Wild

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#1 of 1 Posted 9/4/07 10:57 PM

From Harveycritic Posts 1632 Last Nov-2
To All [Msg # 22620.1 ]

INTO THE WILD

Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Paramount Vantage
Grade: B+
Directed by:    Sean Penn
Written By: Sean Penn
Cast:   Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener, Jena Malone,
Kristen Stewart, Vince Vaughn, Brian Dierker
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 9/4/07
Opens: September 21, 2007

If most people were like 22-year-old Christopher McCandless, the character played by Emile Hirsch in
writer-director Sean Penn's "Into the Wild," what would we do when we had a toothache? Needed a new pair of pants? Felt like shopping for a six-pack and a loaf of bread? You see, in this film based on a true story, Christopher McCandless, flush with all the material and intellectual goodies an American could want and destined for Harvey Law School after graduating with honors from Atlanta’s Emory University, chucks everything. He shrugs off his family, a $24,000 college savings fund which his father would supplement with a new Cadillac, and heads off across the land like John Steinbeck–who traveled with his dog Charlie and wrote of his encounters with Americans from all walks of life. Like Steinbeck, Chris did a great amount of traveling cross-country journeying. He too ran into Americans of diverse backgrounds. But unlike Steinbeck–an author not necessarily favored by Christopher, whose tastes ran more to Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau and maybe even Lord Byron–this 22-year-old entertained a vision quite strange for someone his age, someone who today, a decade after his demise, would be most focuses about balancing a cell phone, a Blackberry and an I-Pod. He wanted to go into the wild, into isolated regions of Alaska–alone.

Why? Sean Penn gives us glimpses into the sometimes physical fights of Chris’s upper-middle-class folks: an alcoholic mother, Billie (Marcia Gay Harden) an a remote, though financially supporting father, Walt (William Hurt). We also learn that Chris and his sister, Carine (Jena Malone–who narrates the film), were born at a time that their dad was married to another woman–which nowadays is no big deal and would not explain Chris’s wanderlust. One gets the impression, then, that for some reason not elucidated by the film, Chris suffered from a psychotic break that changed his life and sealed his doom. Instead of joining a group of friends with his backpack to head off to Europe to “find” himself for a year or so just a summer, he determines to seek solitude, realizing too late, as he states in his journal, that happiness is to be shared.

Emile Hirsch lost forty-one pounds during the course of the filming in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Mexico and elsewhere, getting down to 115 pounds (which for the 5'7" Hirsch would give him a body mass index of 18.0, only slightly underweight, though he looks emaciated by the finale). Hirsch dominates the movie.   In his push to the story’s center, though, he has vigorous competition from our lush Western and Northwestern scenery. Eric Gautier’s lenses capture the beckoning but dangerous rapids; the deceptively peaceful mountain ranges; and the density of the forests whose silence is broken only by the occasional tramp of squirrels, moose, and a bear–the first two of which serve as food for Christopher, who had impulsively burned his social security card and some cash left over after making a $24,000 donation to Oxfam. To make a few bucks, he gets an occasional job--in a grain elevator, where he meets a boisterous Wayne (Vince Vaughn), and for a while in a burger joint. Among the noncomformists he meets out West are Jan (Catherine Keener), whose own son had disappeared and who has teamed up to sell books with Rainey (Brian Dierker)–the latter played by a marine expert in white water rafting, a nonprofessional performer who probably would find no competition even within the Actors Guild for the role.

He is influenced–and influences–an elderly widower in the California desert, Ron (Hal Holbrook), who is both critical and admiring of his young visitor’s determination to get to Alaska or bust. Chris is almost seduced by a 16-year-old singer-guitarist, Tracy (Kristen Stewart), ethically resisting the charms of this pretty underage girl.

From the travel point of view, “Into the Wild” could easily whet its audience’s wanderlust–to go West through the beautiful states of Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and California–but to rely on the travel companies like Maupintour should they want to visit Alaska. Chris, who had changed his name to Alexander during a voyage that had his parents frantically and unsuccessfully trying to locate him with the aid of private detectives, was born too early to possess a cell phone. If he had one, he’d as soon have tossed it away, an instrument that has its detractors but would literally have been a lifesaver for this peripatetic youth.

Was Chris disturbed, furious at his parents’ materialism, bickering, and physical assaults on each other? Or was he a bold adventurer in the great spirit of America? We in the audience are left to ponder the question which had been asked months before in Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name which has been on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for 117 weeks and counting. Hirsch’s performance may be short of charismatic but the 22-year-old actor, considered by some to be numero uno of his generation, projects his character’s libertarian gumption with all of its self-destructive nature.

Rated R.    147 minutes   © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Into the Wild

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