Didn't Find This Movie Remotely Moving

Rating: 6/10 (12 October 2007)

It's too bad that I saw Werner Herzog's amazing documentary "Grizzly Man" before I saw "Into the Wild." One can't help but be reminded of Herzog's film while watching Penn's, or the fact that Herzog's is so much better.
Both films have as their focus troubled young men who travel to the Alaskan wilderness to escape a society in which they feel they don't belong. Both men have persecution complexes of a sort, and feel that there's something noble in their efforts to commune with the wilderness. But "Grizzly Man" is an objective, journalistic account of Timothy Treadwell, and Herzog's fascination is with the obsessions that made him tick. "Into the Wild," being a fictional film, is already once-removed from the real-life story of Christopher McCandless, and director Penn piles on so much bombast and padding, that the impact of the story becomes blunted under a veneer of pure Hollywood studio.
My biggest obstacle in liking this film is that I didn't like the character of Christopher, nor did I like Emile Hirsch, the actor who plays him. McCandless, who gives himself the moniker Alexander Supertramp once he's set off on his odyssey, is an arrogant 20-year old who thinks he has the world figured out, and woe be to anyone who tries to tell him otherwise. His psychological troubles stem from the emotionally (and the movie suggests at times physically) abusive environment he grew up in. His parents are played by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden as cartoonish caricatures of Southern aristocracy; his sister, played by Jena Malone, is the only one who Christopher believes understands him, and her character provides the film with one of the most thudding voice over narrations I've ever heard in a movie. We get it -- he shuns the materialistic world as a way of shunning his affluent parents. But a two and a half hour movie built around a kid learning a lesson that many of us already knew going into it makes for a mighty tedious movie indeed.
That lesson, learned too late, is that human companionship makes life worth living, and that happiness means very little if you have no one to share it with. Many recognizable actors show up throughout the film as strangers Christopher comes across and develops fleeting relationships with, and all of them have a chance to pontificate. The trouble is that all of them (especially Catherine Keener as a hippie and Hal Holbrook as a lonely old man) are so much more interesting than Christopher himself that we wish the movie would stay with them and let Christoper be on his merry way.
This movie really copped out as far as I'm concerned. Everyone Christopher comes across is gently understanding of his plan even if they try to discourage him. Not once does someone tell him that his actions represent supreme cowardice and hypocrisy. If he was so bothered by the state of society, why didn't he do something productive to help change it rather than run away and hide? Maybe this is the point Penn was trying to make, but I felt like Penn himself couldn't decide whether Christopher's behavior was foolish or admirable.
I feel like I was meant to come away from this film moved by the tragedy of a life wasted. But I wasn't moved at all, nor did I find it all that tragic. "Grizzly Man" -- now THERE's a film that moved me.
Grade: B-