Force of Nature

A suburban kid goes alone into the Alaskan wild, but he doesn't get far.

by Sam Adams

ROAD TO JOY: Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) embarks on his quest for purity and self-definition.

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Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) first appears in Into the Wild as a fugitive shape at the edge of the frame, a tiny figure etched against the white crust of an Alaskan winter. The scene was shot not far from where the real Chris McCandless starved to death, nearly four months after leaving civilization behind and two years after he cut up his driver's license, gave his life savings to charity and, as far as anyone who knew him was concerned, disappeared off the face of the Earth.

When the story of McCandless' death broke, first in newspapers, later in an article Jon Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine, he was pilloried as a rash, daydreaming city kid who bit off more than he could chew and paid the price. But in Krakauer's book version of McCandless' life, and in Sean Penn's adaptation of it, McCandless becomes something else, part secular saint, part cautionary tale.

Steeped in Thoreau and Jack London, McCandless saw himself as a natural man struggling against the corruptions of the modern world. Krakauer largely insulates his readers from the (apparently) overwrought prose McCandless scribbled on his journeys, but Penn has him call himself "an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road," a heady epithet for an upper-middle-class kid from the Virginia suburbs.

McCandless' actions are characterized by the excesses of a true believer, but the most surprising thing about Penn's film is how restrained it is. Penn's previous movies as a director have been unfailingly pretentious, but Into the Wild is altogether different, a unified, long-haul work that is rarely caught straining for effect. There's little doubt that Penn sees himself in Chris McCandless' disgust with mainstream society, his quest for purity and self-definition.

Penn, who wrote the adaptation himself, sets McCandless' journey within a series of frames. He begins with McCandless entering the Alaskan wild at the end of his journey, setting up camp in an abandoned bus. When he stands on its roof and yells, "Can anybody hear me?" it's not a cry for help but a means of verifying his solitude. He whoops back deliriously, "Guess not!"

Returning to McCandless' college graduation, Penn divides the movie into chapters: "Birth," "Adolescence" and so on. Periodically, a voiceover by his sister Carine (Jena Malone) picks up the story on the home front, detailing the troubled home life that helped sour McCandless' view of material wealth, but also the gaping hole that his abrupt and unannounced departure left in his family. Penn sketches in the outlines of McCandless' upbringing, tying his rejection of authority to his anger toward his unyielding and abusive father. But the movie presents McCandless' solitary odyssey not as an inevitability but a choice, and as far as his family is concerned, a particularly harsh and unforgiving one.

Into the Wild's Chris McCandless is a classic movie hero, a living embodiment of an idea taken to its limits. But he's also petulant and grandiose, with an ugly self-righteous streak. When his parents, played to repressed perfection by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, make the mistake of offering him a new car to replace his beat-up Datsun, his response is a withering, "I don't want any thing."

More schematically than Krakauer's book, Penn's movie presents McCandless with a series of familial surrogates that he embraces and rejects in turn. Vince Vaughn's gregarious grain farmer offers him acceptance and comradeship, and a hippie couple (Catherine Keener and the splendid newcomer Brian Dierker) tenderly take him in until he vanishes one night, leaving behind a thank-you note scrawled in the sand.

The most poignant connection is forged near the end, when McCandless crosses paths with an elderly widower named Ron Franz, played by Hal Holbrook. Rather than indulging his young friend's rhetoric, Holbrook's pugnacious veteran squarely rebuts him, while at the same time offering the closest thing to love that McCandless has ever known. But McCandless doesn't warm to, or seem to notice, the old man's affection. Perhaps he's too scarred, or too suspicious, to let the old man in, but it's hard not to hate McCandless a little when he condescendingly tells him, "You're wrong if you think the joy of life comes primarily from human interaction."

As a director, Penn has often pushed his actors into caricature, but Into the Wild's performances, while full of life, are graciously understated. Hirsch's devil-may-care grin morphs seamlessly into a cry of rage, and Holbrook is a flat-out revelation, his technique so flawlessly camouflaged that he's easy to mistake for someone who's never acted before. For as much effort as Penn evidently put into the movie, the end result feels as if it hasn't been worked on at all.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Into the Wild

Written and directed by Sean Penn

A Paramount Vantage release