Lovely, pensive, thought-provoking...

Rating: 9/10 (10 March 2014)

I have heard about "Into the Wild" for years and was pleasantly surprised to see it available on Netflix the other day.
When I started watching I knew I was getting into something special, made artful and powerful principally by the scenery, the limits of the words it chooses to use carefully (there's relatively little dialog throughout the movie) and the drama and depth of humanity that plays out in Emile Hirsch's fantastic portrayal of a young man who had the self-awareness and depth of character to take a very, very different path in life from where his parents and society expected him to go.
The romanticism of McCandless' adventure gets laid on pretty thick at times, but Penn, to his credit, pulls back at the right moments. I think we see that it wasn't all beautiful landscapes and luminous, contemplative starry- eyed obsessions with Thoreau and Russian writers. McCandless put himself in tremendously difficult and dangerous situations and had to do pretty mundane things to survive (like work actual jobs while he was tramping around).
The film has the peripatetic feeling of a Kerouac novel and is paced freely, bouncing between McCandless' final Alaskan adventure as the last set-piece for the movie, and his tramping all around the country, going from mid- Western wheat plains to the Southern California and Arizona deserts to coastal California and much of the forests in Oregon and Washington before heading to Alaska.
We get some insight into his family dynamic and the overdubs in the voice of his sister often serve as recollections of the truly painful history he had with his parents. If you learn more about the McCandless family and - hopefully not giving too much away - there is considerable controversy and debate over how and why McCandless starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness and also considerable debate about how his mother and father are depicted.
I think we can debate endlessly over whether McCandless was being arrogant and foolish for doing some of the things he did, but the movie does take some artistic license with the decisions he made. He may not have been quite as crazy as he is occasionally depicted but, regardless, his decision to head alone into the Alaskan wilderness as a largely green and an inexperienced outdoorsman could be thought of as an ultimately naive and ill-informed decision. But then if someone jumping out of a plane ends up dying we can think their decision daring and ill-informed, too.
Eddie Vedder's soundtrack is a perfect compliment to the movie and is much a part of it as the rivers, forests, and desert landscapes are.
"Into the Wild" is, regardless of its occasional artistic license and perhaps occasional swoon of romanticism over someone who appears to be a true rebel, is truly a wonderful and powerfully thought-provoking film well worth watching.