Leaves It To You To Decide...

Rating: 10/10 (11 March 2008)

At first, I wasn't sure how to feel about INTO THE WILD. I'd read the book a few years ago and enjoyed it, but it left me feeling a bit bitter about someone as privileged as Chris McCandless (the main character/person in Jon Krakauer's nonfiction novel by the same name) who shuns his upper echelon possibilities after graduating from Emory and disappears into America, leading the free life of a moneyless vagabond.
Certainly we've all thought about what it would be like to be completely unencumbered by the shackles of "things." No cars. No mortgages/rent. Nothing but the open road and endless options spreading out before us. And this is what makes us care for Chris McCandless, the unfortunate (and very misguided) young man who's fate is tied to his own ignorance of what that kind of life entails.
If you speak to anyone from Alaska, most will tell you what an idiot McCandless was. He went into the wild with only a backpack and a rifle, supposedly "ready" to live the life of a hermit on a decrepit and abandoned school bus. The Alaskan wilderness (or any comparable wilderness really) is unforgiving. If you aren't prepared, you're going to die. And McCandless, with his lofty dreams of wildlife living, was ill-prepared in the extreme; his life cut short due to his own ignorance.
So why the high rating, you may ask? Well, I'm not here to support or degrade what McCandless did or didn't do. I'm here to rate the film, and on that, you can't help but appreciate what director Sean Penn has given us. Showing McCandless' strengths and weaknesses, Penn guides us through the life of Chris without telling us how to feel about it. Actor Emile Hirsch pulls in an extremely powerful performance as Chris McCandless. The fact that the Academy didn't recognize him is a shame; they did note Hal Holbrook's supporting actor performance (which was damn good), but a far cry from Hirsch's awesome job (he lost 40 lbs during the filming so that he could show McCandless' starvation). Penn's screen writing and directing are flat-out amazing, giving us a story that allows the viewer to make his or her own judgements about this very enigmatic young man.
I feel compelled to mention that some may compare McCandless' actions with those of another dead Alaskan visitor, Timothy Treadwell of the nonfiction film GRIZZLY MAN. Although both certainly had their failings, Treadwell was definitely mentally ill, while McCandless simply seems to lack life goals and instead substitutes vagrancy in order to run away from problems back home.
In the end, I finally came to the conclusion that Penn did exactly what all great film makers do: he gave us a story that many people probably would've found pretentious and plopped into our laps without any filters or rose-coloring. That put the burden on the audience to come to terms with what McCandless' life really meant. Fool? Free-Spirit? Ignorant preppie? Loving brother? Easy-going drifter? Or perhaps a mesh of many of those.
You decide.