A Wrenching Portrait

Rating: Null/10 (21 January 2009)

Sean Penn's, Into the Wild is an alternately enthralling and wrenching portrait of a young man who ran from his problems and searched for peace and found paradise and, in turn, anguish and despair. Chris McCandless' journey is a gripping travelogue that's both a cautionary tale and a vicariously exhilarating experience; man, it looked like he had a whale of a good time, but man, did it end badly for him.
First and foremost, what makes Into the Wild work so flawlessly is that even knowing the final outcome doesn't change the overall effect that movie will have on the average moviegoer. Based on McCandless' real story, the movie pulls few punches in how the protagonist is depicted; he's neither a saint nor a sinner, just an idealistic (and not naive), troubled college graduate who feels adrift from literally everything: parents, life, friends.
Chris (Emile Hirsch) is a highly intelligent Emory College grad, the son of a NASA scientist (William Hurt) and an entrepreneur (Marcia Gay Harden). But unlike other privileged young citizens, Chris has no intentions of enjoying the gifts and wealth his family and connections have afforded him. Instead, he gives away his life savings of $24,000, abandons his beat-up Datsun, leaves his family behind (without telling them), and sets off on a trek around the country.
Chris's travels take him literally all over the country, across the midwest (where he runs a grain harvester for Vince Vaughn), to the Rocky Mountains, to the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, even down to Mexico, winding up at his ultimate resting spot: deepest, darkest, remotest Alaska. The story is told in two timelines, one of the present (the time shortly before and after Chris discovers an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness), and one of the past, the events leading up to Chris's Magic Bus time. And the two timelines are brilliantly juxtaposed with each other by director Sean Penn, who doesn't just show us a perfectly linear chronology of how Chris came to be in an abandoned bus; he shows us the story behind the adventurer, the believer, the angel, the tactiturn rebel, the iconoclast.
So what made Chris McCandeless decide to ditch everything and live off the land like some latter-day flower child? I'll explain no further than to say that his upbringing, under the commanding, demanding eyes of his overachieving, arguing parents, played a huge role - but perhaps not the only role. In short, Chris decides he simply does not wish to be part of the rat race; he does not wish to be trapped in a meaningless job working for a meaningless company doing trite, soul-destroying things. He wants to live and learn on his own. And that's where the inspirational aspect of this kicks in. He sets out to accomplish something undefined (i.e., the abstract Find Himself) and winds up absorbing more knowledge through his experiences than most people do through their lonely lives of quiet desperation.
Along the way, Chris meets myriad people, and it's genuinely touching how much of an impact he has on their lives as he passes through. In particular, Catherine Keener plays an aging hippie whose love for her soul mate (Brian Dierker) has begun to fade; the mere presence of the Christ-like Chris magically changes that, for the better. (A lesser film might have had Chris and Jan sleeping together to foment complications in everyone's relationship.) Chris tells everyone he meets that his ultimate goal is to live in the Alaskan wilderness, consequences be damned; everyone tells him not to do it.
The impression we're finally left with of Christopher McCandless is that of a clever, thoughtful, engaging young man who had more demons than a nightmare of Clive Barker dopplegangers. Haunted by his own harrowing childhood, he escaped as literally and figuratively as he could, living by the seat of his pants over thousands of miles of gravel, sand, and asphalt. His motives might have been a bit selfish (he never did try to contact his family, the film tells us), but his heart seemed to be in the right place otherwise. Which made his demise all the harder to bear.
Hal Holbrook, playing a crusty benefactor to Chris in the Arizona desert, earned an Oscar nomination, and it's well deserved, but even stronger accolades are due to Hirsch, who underwent tremendous physical changes just to play Chris McCandless properly. And the final scene, the waning moments of Chris's life, is so vivid and packed with emotion that you almost can't bear to watch, peeking instead through crossed fingers. Hirsch is so excellent in the role that it's a travesty of some magnitude that he wasn't more widely recognized for his grueling, gutty performance. Even more so when you realize the guy later played Speed Racer and previously had been best known for being Judd Hirsch's kid.