Excellent, even-handed portrayal of a grunge-apostle's pilgrimage

Rating: 10/10 (19 May 2008)

For he's one of my favorite actors, I've always feared Sean Penn would eventually leave acting to have more time to direct. Fortunately he seems to find the time to appear on both sides of the camera, and by doing so he's gradually become one of my favorite directors as well.
When I've first seen the trailer I thought: looks like some Great American Adventure. Guy thinks he can do everything, compete with Naturte (mind you: it's The Great American Outdoors kind of nature, not some national park in Germany where you might forage on the leftover of tourists) and WIN over Nature. Well enough, if somebody like Mel Gibson had directed the movie, I would have continued to have such preconceptions, but Sean Penn made me not just curious but full of expectations.
And he haven't let me down.
There is the American Guy similar to what I imagined he would appear: arrogant, conceited, full of judgment towards almost literally everyone. He's not just smart but intelligent, he's reading worthy books, and absorbs some very good ideas, like money makes us too cautious, careers are 20Th century inventions, etc. But he's posing with his superior intelligence rather than trying to show the way to others. You can't be mad at him, because he's special like an alien from space, however you wont understand what is his true point, because maybe it's not clear to himself either.
Obviously, he falls. He could have easily fallen way much earlier on his Odyssey but he's been blessed by the Gods, maybe because that was the plan with his life. To leave a mark. To make a point. A bit too late maybe, but the stuff landed in good hands, and the moral of the story is not distorted into an American heroic tale, it is what it is. You might watch it for the great scenes, for good acting and forget about the monologues/dialogs. You might pack up to go camping without a gas cooker and a folding chair to feel the need for something and be proud that you can cope with it. You might say what a stupid sap he was to give away $24.000 and a promising life, and you might as well prove your point to some idealist friend/schoolmate over a few beers and be proud what a clever product of the Western Educational Industry" you are. You might as well go insane and pack for Siberia. You may chose your views on the matter because you are not brainwashed by the movie and that's the main issue here.
I have my own concepts about life, the universe and everything. I hope everybody does. You don't care what's mine, so I don't add it to this comment. But there's one thing I'd like to add to to this comment: go and see this movie! It might not change your way of life but it will have an impact on you, and these kind of movies are harder and harder to find these days.
Usually I don't care much about the music, but Eddie Vedder here brings back some extra emotion towards the nineties when there was a kind of attempt to draw youngsters' attention away from 'The Grid' and highlight more important things than cool gadgets and promising careers. It can be compared with 'American Psycho' where the music was even more strongly implanted to set you back to the eighties. You may as well go as far as to compare the two extreme characters (Bateman and McCandless) and ask yourself to which the youth of the naughties is similar? Personally, I hope that since we seem to copy the eighties right now, we'd get to copying the nineties soon, and without the need of such exaggerations Chris McCandless went into, we could possibly find a more humane model to identify ourselves with.