Unfulfilled promise

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2007)

I was disappointed by Penn's film adaptation of Into the Wild. On the positive side, I found Catherine Keener's performance as Jan Burres completely convincing. I enjoyed the Vedder soundtrack, and I thought certain cinematic elements were beautiful (though not always serving to the storyline) such as the night shots in L.A. However, there was a lot a didn't care for. The voice over narration by Carine McCandless (Jena Malone) didn't work for me because the story was not hers to tell, and the narration together with the rapid cutting within scenes and the frequent temporal shifts left me unable to identify with either Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) or the viewpoints of the characters that Chris met along his way as I was able to do with, for example, the supporting characters in Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985). Being unable to identify with any of the characters, I was left in the position of an outside observer and here Penn failed to make much of this position either. For example, Penn did not use the camera to show us anything that Chris failed to figure out. Krakauer's book makes clearer that the magic bus was not as isolated as Chris believed it to be, and that the seasonal river that cut off Chris's planned departure route could have been crossed upstream. Penn could have unobtrusively shared this information with the viewer, but chose to withhold it for the purpose, I suspect, of romanticizing Chris's adventure.