Possible Spoilers: Cold-Hearted Me

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2008)

The best thing about "Into the Wild" is Hal Holbrook, the venerable actor whose name will forever be associated with his traveling one-man show, "Mark Twain Tonight!" Here he is utterly convincing as a solitary old man who befriends Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch's character) on his way to the Alaska wilderness and offers to adopt him as his grandson, having lost his wife and only child in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. But the focus, of course, is on McCandless, who is fleeing his parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt) and his own middle class life. I haven't read the book on which the movie is based and I don't intend to. Chris McCandless may be a real person but his story isn't all that interesting. Moreover, since he communicated directly with no one, not even his beloved sister (Jena Malone), his story has to be conjectural and its reconstruction on the screen is unconvincing. Frankly, I couldn't bring myself to care much about him or his reasons for ditching his parents or their pain. I kept wondering, however, why he never bothered to communicate with his sister, whom he supposedly loved. That he undertook an adventure for which he was essentially unprepared and eventually died because he could not cross back over the fast-flowing river he had originally forded during the winter when it was reduced to a trickle did not move me and his slow starvation was not heart-breaking because I was impatient for the movie to end.