Sean Penn's Powerful Movie About A Character Study of McCandless

Rating: 10/10 (14 October 2011)

Jon Krakauer's novel,"Into The Wild" was a book assigned during my English courses when I was still in college.I found the book interesting since I have always been intrigued by the travel stories of Christopher McCandless.When it was turned into a movie,I expected a little less compared to the non-fiction novel I read.The talented actor,Sean Penn did not disappoint me in terms of his screenplay and his directorial effort for the book's adaptation into the big screen.It became an epic movie no less.
The story starts in April 1992.It was during that time that Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) arrives in a remote area of the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and sets up a campsite in an abandoned bus. At first, McCandless is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature around, and the thrill of living off the land. He hunts wild animals with a .22 caliber rifle, reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts as he prepares for himself a new life in the wild.
Two years earlier in May 1990, McCandless graduates with high honors from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly afterwards, McCandless rejects his conventional life by destroying all of his credit cards and identification documents. He donates nearly his entire savings of $24,000 to Oxfam and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well- used, but reliable Datsun to experience life in the wilderness. However, McCandless does not tell his parents Walt (William Hurt) and Billie McCandless (Marcia Gay Harden) nor his sister Carine (Jena Malone) what he is doing or where he is going, and refuses to keep in touch with them after his departure, leaving them to become increasingly anxious and eventually desperate.
Years later at the abandoned bus, life for McCandless becomes harder and he becomes less discerning. As his supplies begin to run out, McCandless realizes that nature is also harsh and uncaring. In the pain of realization, McCandless concludes that true happiness can only be found when shared with others and seeks to return from the wild to his friends and family. However, he finds that the stream he had crossed during the winter has become wide, deep, and violent due to the thaw, and thus he is unable to cross. Saddened, McCandless returns to the bus, now as a prisoner who is no longer in control of his fate and can only hope for help from the outside. In a desperate act, McCandless is forced to gather and eat roots and plants, but he confuses similar plants and becomes ill as a result. Slowly dying, McCandless continues to document his process of self-realization and accepts his fate, as he imagines his family for one last time. He writes a farewell to the world and crawls into his sleeping bag to die. Two weeks later, his body is found by moose hunters. Shortly afterwards, Carine returns her brother's ashes by airplane from Alaska to Virginia in her backpack.
This film is has a powerful message about the effects of our uncompromising choices in life;a person's search for identity and place in this world; and most of all,that people need to connect with one another in this journey called life especially with one's family.Those are the things that McCandless realized at the time of his death.Too bad,that he never knew them until he had gone to the wilderness.
Aside from that,this movie is a character study of Christopher Johnson McCandless.When one sees the film,you either love him or hate him. It never presented him a hero or a martyr for his philosophical ideas nor idealism.It also presented him as a selfish person who wanted to inflict pain in his family as he was probably on conscious "suicide journey" into the wilderness.The confusion it brings is what makes the movie a great one.A viewer can relate to him one way or another.
It was truly one of the best films I have seen in myself.Sean Penn has simply created one of the best films that a person could relate to especially in his search for the meaning of life.