Into the Wild

It took me a while to get into Into the Wild. I'm an unabashed hedonist, who considers a two-star motel roughing it, so it was hard for me to understand the motivation of Chris McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch. After graduating from college he gives away his life savings to charity and hits the road, sleeping under the stars and trying to live the kind of life written about by men like Thoreau and Jack London. Though he doesn't have a lot of knowledge about living this kind of life, he manages a hardscrabble existence, occasionally taking jobs.

But, as the film wore on, I understood what it was about, at least in the interpretation by writer and director Sean Penn (I have not read the source book by Jon Krakauer). McCandless' primary motivation seems to be a hatred of his father, who is a violent blowhard, played to stuffed shirt precision by William Hurt. The ironic thing is that McCandless runs into a series of parental figures, who seem to be seeking a child figure rather than the other way around. He meets a pair of aging hippies (Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener)--she has a long-lost son. He works for a while as a combiner for Vince Vaughn, who loves having someone around to spill his philosophy of life. And then me meets a lonely retiree, touchingly played by Hal Holbrook, who lost his wife and son in an automobile accident years before.

All of these people offer McCandless a home life, but he moves on, his goal to move to complete isolation in the Alaskan wilderness. He is dangerously ill-equipped for this adventure, even though going in the summer. He manages to find an abandoned bus to live in, but disaster would seem to be right around the corner.

Before seeing the film I thought it would be similar to Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, also about a man foolishly taking on the Alaskan wilderness. But the grizzly guy was a lunatic. McCandless isn't necessarily crazy, he's just misguided. I doubt Thoreau would have gone to such links (Walden Pond was only a mile or two away from Concord, and he had constant human contact), but through Penn's screenplay and Hirsch's portrayal we can at least understand where's he's coming from. Of course, most of us can only sit there and cringe as he tramps off into Alaska, especially if we know already how it will turn out. Also, it was hard for me to empathize with a guy who passed up the hippie community, especially since there was a girl, played by Kristen Stewart as the ultimate hippie-chick fantasy, who wanted to jump his bones. Saying no to that must have taken a lot of willpower.

This is certainly Penn's most accomplished work as a director, following the bleak Indian Runner and The Crossing Guard, although this film does have a meditative approach that will put off the most restless of viewers. The songs by Eddie Vedder are appropriate, and the location photography is at times breathtaking (especially on McCandless' paddling down the Grand Canyon, where he meets an enthusiastic pair of German tourists). This is a very fine film.