Into the Wild - Review

                                                

                               

Adventure, Louis L'amour once wrote, is just another word for trouble.

Chris McCandless should have been familiar with the quote; the last thing he ever wrote was scrawled on a page from L'amour's autobiography. Familiar or not, he certainly failed to heed the words.

McCandless, a graduate of Emory University, set off on his 'Great Alaskan Adventure' in the spring of 1992, journeying alone in to the woods. He carried with him no compass or map and had more pounds in his backpack devoted to books than food.

He died of starvation 113 days later.

Into the Wild is Sean Penn's take on McCandless. Adapted from the best selling book by Jon Krakauer the movie does its best to portray Chris as a visionary. In Penn's eyes, and through the narration of the actress playing his sister, we are meant to see him as a sincere and thoughtful philosopher who correctly identified the wrongs of the material world and retreated into the arms of nature.

I'll grant him some of that. Right or wrong McCandless seemed to sincerely believe in his world-view, donating more than $24,000 to charity and traveling alone around the nation for more than two years like a modern day Johnny Appleseed before his ill-fated Alaskan trip. If some of the theatrical quotes he left behind were sincere, he deeply felt his convictions.

What the movie barely touches on is his inherent selfishness* He left for his journey without telling anyone and for two years his parents and family waited for him, filled with hurt and dread. For good reason.  The next time they would hear of Chris would be when moose hunters found his decomposed body.

The reason behind this willingness to hurt his loved ones? A 'troubled' youth where his parents often fought and his shame at knowing that he was conceived out of wedlock.

It's hard for me not to smirk and write him off as yet another rich-boy with rich-boy problems. I guarantee you half the people in the audience, if not more, had a childhood a dozen times tougher and one in three has a 'shameful' secret much worse than the mere timing of their conception.

To refuse his parents offer of a new car because it was an insult and too material (especially when it was made clear it would be a midrange car)? To burn cash on the side of the road? To take  $24,000 of your parents money that they gave you for school and give it away? To time and again shrug off the efforts of your parents to express their love for their son, however awkwardly?

These, frankly, are not the actions of someone who grew up with 'real' problems.

And to Penn's credit he does hint at the reactionary nature of Chris' odyssey. Time and again he is presented with surrogate family figures on the road, each of whom criticize his actions and urge him to contact his family. Each time they are rebuffed and Chris moves on, unwilling to face his own flaws.

As a movie Into the Wild is overly long, with a two and a half hour run time that could easily have been trimmed, ironically enough, by cutting the unnecessary and largely fictional encounter with a love interest. I did not find the acting of  Emile Hirsch all that impressive, but I know I'm in the minority on that.

3 stars out of 4, 70 out of 100.

One more thing: Chris died of starvation in part because he was cut off from escape by an 'impassible' river. Had he carried a map he would have known that a 1/4th of a mile down there was a tram across that river, and an hours walk in the other direction would have led him to an emergency station packed with rations - again, clearly identified on local maps.

 

* let me be clear in respect to his memory: I speak of the character, who may or may not reflect this part of his life accurately