Beautiful marriage of image and music is greatly lessened by central character who is impossible to admire (SPOILERS)

Rating: 4/10 (30 March 2008)

(SPOILER ALERT:I will discuss the end of the film so if you don't want to know, don't read on.) Yesterday I watched Sean Penn's film of INTO THE WILD. This is the story of a college grad named Chris McCandless, who turned his back on civilization and wandered off into the wilds of Alaska. Its based on a book by Jonathan Krakauer who wrote Into Thin Air about a climb up Everest that went all wrong.
I waited a while before posting this because I had to think about it. There is a great deal to love and a central character who was very hard to.
This is a beautiful movie. The marriage of image with the exceptional score is truly amazing.I loved watching the sound and image dance across my TV screen. The problem for me is that once the characters began to talk I couldn't careless. For what ever reason I couldn't connect to McCandless at all. He sounded like a spoiled brat. I don't know if its because McCandless was a twit or because Sean Penn has chosen to portray him as an epic hero for individualism. For me there was nothing he did or said that deserved a two and a half hour movie other than living a life that we could project a sense of longing and lost utopia on to. Clearly it connects with some part of ourselves that connect to Thoreau's Walden the great tale of self reliance (and which apparently is a lie since Thoreau went home every night for a good meal and a warm bed). It was clear to me that he was heading for trouble, and even if I hadn't known how it all came out I probably could have guessed.
Technically I think this is probably one of the best films of last year, but emotionally I don't. I know a good number of people are in love with the film and it's just outside the IMDb top 100, but I'm lost as to why. For me its a beautifully told film that is in its way close to death porn, where the death of the hero somehow makes everything transcendent- or rather is changed into something transcendent so that someone's life has meaning, instead of being a cold lonely painful death all alone somewhere in the wild. For me there was no transcendence only sadness at a life lost.