The road to nowhere

Rating: 5/10 (24 December 2007)

Christopher McCandless wants to be a free spirit. He wants to break the shackles of institutionalised education and ambition. Of parent's expectations and society's reliance on definition by what we do. He graduates college, donates all his savings to charity, erases all record of his existence and runs away from home to be in the wild. The justifications for Christopher's journey into the beyond are slowly revealed through flashbacks and memories of his family, through interactions and friendships with a range of colourful characters along the way. He is ultimately selfish, passionate, angry, and frustrated. But he is smart, reflective and free. It appears that he wants to anger those around him to prove himself to them, to prove himself to the natural elements. In this way he is brave and arrogant but he fancies himself a thinker. His actions and adventures end up causing harm to himself and minor setbacks in his journey. Each episode he makes is such that of life  a grand plan carried away into detours where the wind blows. For all this time in the wild he never communicates with family but forms new relationships with complete strangers, who take to Christopher's infectious and vivacious attitude to life. Christopher hopes to derive some meaning to life from getting out there and 'just living' but the land proves to be just as harsh and uncompromising as the rules and standards he faced back home.
The scenery, filmed in the Western U.S states, is very picturesque and expansive, demonstrating an impressive variety of landscapes and lifestyles, yet proving itself a formidable adversary for our hero. As is the case for many ensemble pieces, Christopher's idiosyncratic troupe of hippies, musicians, tourists, nomads, farmers, and fathers form an instrumental role in his spiritual growth and eventual destination. They all help Christopher along on his journey, but he able to teach them a thing or two about living. With his apparent naivety and joie-de-vivre, they form somewhat of a de-facto family to Christopher, and some of the closest relationships he experiences. Christopher affects each of them greatly, from Jan and Rainey's relationship counselling to educating Wayne with his abstract musings on 'living', and to octogenarian Ron who learn to live and be free. While Christopher is clearly alone in the wild, he meets others alone in life. And through his new-age philosophy, he enhances their lives with new found insight and action.
But for all his philosophising and gung-ho attitude to life, I just couldn't accept that he could just leave his parents and sister for dead back home, not even to write or call (even if they tried to find him). To go on a journey with no plan and no money is somewhat foolish, thus his reasoning for the journey. But even if the journey is more important than the destination. What was achieved in the end? Couldn't he have talked through this with his family, his sister? Why only now when surely he had support and friends back home? Martyrdom is an effective device in telling a story but in all reality, it's futile and a waste of life. Call me a pragmatist, a realist, but the fact that he made it out there for 2 years, refused to give up and died for his means is naïve and pointless.
Sean Penn has crafted a strong that has a good heart, but fairly unfocused and lengthy considering many scenes should have been cut. The direction was satisfactory, not stellar and the whole film lags in many places in what could have been a much tighter thrilling story. The abundance of too many erroneous scenes and themes of unrealistic romanticism ultimately fail to convince. Christopher states give me truth over love, money, fame, and fairness. Nice ideals, but I would say get out of the wild, into the real world and wake up.