In search of time not found.

Rating: 7/10 (13 June 2009)

I've never seen a movie quite like this one, not an American movie at any rate. The one that comes closest, maybe, is "Easy Rider," but that one was full of plot points and ambition, raggedy though they turned out. "Into the Wild" is more like an assemblage of episodes from a self-made movie, put together with the help of some family friends who happen to be professional actors.
Emile Hirsch is the non-fictional Chris McCandless who gives away everything he owns, takes to the road, and winds up owning nothing in the Alaskan wilderness, not even the opportunity to savor the emotional fulfillment of being completely and utterly alone.
Hirsch isn't bad either. He is transformed from chubby and cheerful at the start to thin and desperate by the end. I would guess the film sticks pretty closely to its origins, which I think I remember reading in The New Yorker years ago.
The narration is based on Chris's sister's memories and on Chris's own journal but narrations can be misleading or sometimes plain wrong. It seems to be all the fault of McCandless's bickering parents. It was they who drove him to these peregrinations. Well -- that's kind of an easy way out. It provides a satisfying explanation for a story that is likely to be otherwise unexplainable, at least until we know more about neurology. It's always easy to find a trigger for behavior in our past experiences. Psychoanalysis rode that horse for generations. In reality I suspect that strangeness in people is partly a given at birth, and the explanations are post hoc and fitted to the cultural climate. It's tough enough being the parent of an odd child without being blamed for every odd thing he does.
Where was I? I think I started out for the Sea of Cortez and found myself, like Chris, in the North Woods.
The photography is sometimes stunning, often appealing, and sometimes as idiosyncratic as Ray Bolger's dance in "The Wizard of Oz." Step motion, slow motion, negative shots, all are employed but not, thank God, to the point of nausea. The whole film is leisurely, moving back and forth from Chris's encounters at home and on the road, to the Magic Bus he lives in at the top of the world.
Good actors. Nobody in the movie flubs it. Catherine Keener and William Hurt are exceptional performers but they have little to do on screen. Hurt does get a chance to register some convincing abject anguish at the end. Hal Holbrook, now an older man, has never been quite as good as he is here. A home run for Holbrook.
Does the movie have a point? Well, it certainly tries to impose one on the narrative, something along the lines of spiritual fulfillment is worth any price, even life itself. Hirsch dies with an open smile on his face, gazing at opalescent clouds. (If I remember correctly, the real Chris assumed his absence would be noticed and was waiting for an expected helicopter rescue.) The fuzzy points I would take away don't include our need for others in any but a mechanical sense. (We need others to make our shoes and guns.) There have been successful hermits before. I certainly wouldn't conclude from this story that nature is cruel because it isn't. It's just indifferent. What are we, after all, except a widespread large mammal that happens to call itself Homo sapiens?