Prettying up the wild

Rating: 5/10 (4 February 2011)

I sort of liked this film on watch 1; a passive going along with the story kind of enjoyment. But watching it again, Sean Penn's tricksy "directing" and romanticising of "The Wild" became all too obvious.
I didn't get much of a sense of how "wild" The Wild actually is. Or how fundamentally indifferent it is. The unsentimental Wild. The unsympathetic Wild. Living out in The Wild without Ray Mears to hold your hand is probably going to end up in catastrophic failure (i.e death) Its rough out there man. And brutal. But in this aesthetically contrived Wild there's too much of Emile Hirsch lolling about loving it.
Sean Penn does too many prettifying effects; I don't want to be watching slow mo shots of pretty young men in showers for hair care adverts, or bouncing about heroically (but stupidly) around Rapids in flimsy canoes. Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless is too much of a pretty pretty boy. Admittedly, his hair does go abit skanky towards the end. And he gets a bit skeletal. But i never really felt throughout the film that he was "In the Wild", living it hard and horrible.
Even at the end, McCandless's horrible ugly lonely death gets the beauty treatment: a quasi spiritual redemptive dying into The Light.
Sentimentality like that kept popping up its simplistic soft-centred "spiritual" Penn head all over this film like a beautiful bruise.
Every montage (of which there are many) gets infected with an "Alt Country"soundtrack of Eddie Vedder blandishments. We've heard these "Big Americanisms" hundreds of times already.
If you want a less Hollywoodised take on what living in Wilderness is like watch the Channel 4 documentary "Alone in the Wild" Its far more visceral, authentic, and "actual" than this idealised confection.