Should have kept it simple

Rating: 5/10 (29 March 2010)

It's a difficult to task to bring a true story to film and do justice to it. It's even harder when the main character, around whom the entire film revolves, isn't around to help out. Even so, if the filmmakers keep in mind the character's actions and movement through the various phases of the narrative, the story can come out both coherent and true to the existing knowledge of the person's life.
In the case of "Into the Wild" the film was unfortunately made in such a way as to overpower notions of the life of Chris McCandless by excesses in the making of the film. The slow- motion scene of Chris almost falling into a river might make sense to someone who has read the book but it just hangs around in the middle of the movie. The hand-held motions and quick zooms during the self-detox scene tend to obscure what's going on more than to tell the story. All throughout, the mood music is to monotonous. I have an understanding of the use of leitmotif, but this isn't the case here. It's just the same music used throughout the nearly two and a half hours of this movie.
The performances are reasonably good, but the depictions of Chris's family back home are overwrought snippets that are emotionally detached for the viewer. I felt I was seeing outtakes of a drama workshop, rather than a professionally made film.
This film could be interesting. It's an interesting topic and even more poignant because it's essentially true. I can't complain that the movie took liberties, because it didn't. It's failure is that the film makers worked too hard to make things interesting and their efforts are only distracting.