overlong, and without epiphany

Rating: 6/10 (6 January 2008)

Sean Penn's sometimes engrossing and often beautiful film Into The Wild is, in the end analysis, about a character who was basically selfish and self-centered. Like Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors, whom I found to be a self-centered ass, eventually I felt I was on a journey that had little or no revelation, with a person who was primarily selfish, and which leads to (spoiler follows) starvation in the Alaskan wilderness, an ending in which the only meaning I could find was that if you are going to camp next to a river and live off the land, bring a damn fishing pole.
This is not to say the film does not have its strengths. The cinematography makes the most of the beautiful landscapes through which Alexander Supertramp, in an earlier incarnation Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) passes. Also of note are some very strong performances by Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn and Hal Holbrook as people that Alexander meets and bonds with during his journey. The same cannot be said of the lead, however.
Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) is a bright, upper middle class young man who has just graduated college. His parents are ready to gift him with a new car and hope he will apply to Harvard Law. He has other plans - to break the bonds of ordinary American existence and walk the Earth, rootless and without clear destination, in search of ... enlightenment? Escape? Even Chris doesn't seem to know.
The film is narrated by Chris' sister, Carine (played by Jena Malone), and we get some back-story. Chris was a born wanderer - at 4, he wandered away from home at 3 AM and was found 6 blocks away raiding a neighbor's cookie jar. His family life was unhappy - his parents had the kind of marriage that should have led to divorce, but didn't. And he feels a deep, internal rejection of modern life. He burns all his IDs, gives away his money, and drives off into the American southwest in his beat up Datsun. Sleeping in it one night he is caught in a flash flood, and abandons the car, setting off on foot, Burning Man style, with just the shoes on his feet and a backpack, on a voyage of discovery, and taking a new name - Alexander Supertramp.
These are all things that I could sympathize with. Many young people coming out of college seek something different from the lives their parents led. Alexander is simply taking the vision quest to a greater extreme. Without letting his family know where he is, he just disappears. In two years he will climb the highest peak of his journey, tramping off into the Alaskan wilderness alone, into the wild, to get away from civilization altogether.
The initial periods of his journey are the film's strength. Intermittently flashing forward and back from Alaska, the film follows Alex as he meets a couple of hippies with an RV, kayaks down the Colorado river into Mexico, then finds his way to South Dakota where he drives a combine, and so on. On his journey he bonds with a number of unusual individuals, and decides that the place he wants to be is Alaska, away from civilization completely.
However, the film begins to drag. It runs long (two and a half hours) and feels longer. There are really no revelations on his journey, just a series of beautiful landscapes and sometimes kooky characters that float in and out of his life. By the time he meets old coot Ron Franz (a superb Hal Holbrook) I was ready for this movie to hurry up and get to the resolution of his Alaskan adventure. When it is finally reached, I found it rather pointless - although he is equipped for the Wild, has a rifle for hunting, and has found a great camping site (an abandoned bus with a mattress as shelter), his supplies begin to run out and game becomes scarce. Forced to forage for edible plants and berries, he mistakes a poisonous plant for something edible. He is cut off from escape by a flooded river (and has, as I mentioned, NO FISHING POLE) and eventually weakens and succumbs to starvation. He could have at least tried spear-fishing - he had a knife and some waterproof boots.
The film also focuses, perhaps inadvertently, on something Alex did that I found to be unforgivable - the torture of his parents. They see him one last time after graduation at a McCormick & Schmick's in Atlanta before he disappears, and spend the ensuing two years in a state of agony over where their son is. Although I appreciated Alex' desire to find meaning in his life, not providing any word as to his well-being with his parents or his sister is just unforgivable. That may be a personal judgment about the character that not all people who watch this film will share, but that was my reaction.
Another flaw in this film is the casting of Emile Hirsch as the lead. He is appealingly good looking, but there is an inner fire missing there as an actor. Hirsch' Alexander is empty for me. I followed him across some amazing landscapes and through many interesting meetings without ever discovering why someone felt they needed to make a movie out of a young man who became a tramp after college and then starved to death in Alaska. Hal Holbrook is able to convey more depth and emotion in his brief time on screen than Hirsch does while on screen for almost three hours.
There are many sections of Into The Wild that I thoroughly enjoyed, and for a brief period during the first half of the film I was thoroughly engrossed. But that eventually passed, and I continued waiting for a revelation that never came. All in all, nice try, no cigar.