Into the white desert

Rating: 9/10 (14 April 2008)

Sean Penn is becoming one of America's most interesting directors. Although the story-telling here might be conventional, he has his mission.
This is about the top student guy, bound for Harvard, who gives his money away to head freedom. That means crossing USA and entering Alaska.
But freedom has its prize. He meets several people, who don't approve this freedom in different ways. They give him, voluntarily and not, examples of what life really is about. Nobody makes it on this earth without a society, which can mean so many more things when just the state. If you avoid it, you'll get punished by freedom itself.
This is something as unusual as an ideological movie, with a certain morality put there on serious purpose. It doesn't judge the hero, it judges ideas in a way we haven't heard of from American film-making for quite a while. That's interesting.