3.5/5 stars *with some qualifications given below.
Disillusioned with the status-quo mentality of his parents, Christopher McCandless did in his early twenties what many only fantasize about: he fled consumerist society in search of truth and meaning. A modern-day Thoreau, with a conviction that grew more and more resolute the further he trod, Christopher donated his life savings to charity and disappeared into the American wilderness. A couple years later he would succumb to the brute realities of the inhospitable Alaskan frontier, paying a steep price for his attempted solace. Along the way, on the rare occasions he resurfaced from his communion with nature, Christopher made some brief yet significant friendships and from them came many of the insights into life he was ultimately looking for. These witnesses to his journey along with Christopher’s own journal provided the clues to his misguided yet admirable pursuit for truth above all else, and became the source material for a journalistic account of his fateful trip, the best-seller ‘Into the Wild’, written by Jon Krakauer. The rights to the book were soon optioned to Sean Penn, and after an arduous ten years of waiting for parental permission to make a film of their son’s life, Sean finally got the green-light to make his passion-project.
Unfortunately, the ambitions of the film feel as misguided as the journey it depicts.
- Before delving into the particulars I feel the need to preface that this film more than any other shows the shortcomings of my rating system. The admittedly low rating is misleading: it acknowledges the lack of emotional immediacy I felt in my experience of the film, but it does not adequately account for the parallel perfection of intent I feel is everywhere consecrated in Penn’s vision. Normally I would swat this sort of observation away, denying the importance of some hypothetical significance when no such significance was actuated emotionally in my experience, but here it is not so easy to ignore. I am convinced that no finer realization of the story is possible within the strand of conventional storytelling this film obeys.
‘Into the Wild’ gives a third person account of the nomadic life of Christopher, with the voice-over of his sister serving as the narrator, in tandem with occasional passages of Christopher’s journal scrolled across the depicted landscapes. It is a story told out of sequence, interspersing the final days of the Alaskan adventure with the events leading up to its culmination. This one modest deviation from convention gives the lead-up scenes a heightened foreboding as good intentions to veer Christopher from his campaign end in naught. The story hums along, visuals bleeding into one another, the gaze of Christopher directing the fragments of the adventure as they occur, the vocals of Eddie Vedder and the instrumental tinkles of Kaki King underscoring the naïve abandon and small wonders of the experience as the raw power of nature collides with the nearly inexhaustible enthusiasm of the young idealist. From start to finish this is a glossy yet in its own right exemplar depiction of a spiritual journey, the best one could hope from a story so adamantly situated from a third person perspective and the mandates of biographical conflation. Every once in a while, most notably in the final few minutes of the film, the profound subjectivity of the story is captured, but it is so rarely done as the momentum of the story is so reliant on the anecdotes of his life, as a case study and as an allegory (one character refers to him as Jesus), that the existential component of the spiritual journey is rarely touched.
The biopic is my least favorite genre, due in large part to the necessity of imparting an overarching coherent narrative upon a web of complex lived experiences, and the impediment of time conflation. Granted with Christopher’s story, the focus is primarily limited to the couple years of his adventure, but even then, going the conventional story-telling route we are left with an idea more so than a person, and with a topic as sublime as the meaning of life and uncovering spiritual truths, this sort of compromise will always smack of triteness. The same Icarus factor is rampant in biopics that try to explain or portray the genius of the artist through anecdotes imposed with a beginning, middle and end (‘Pollock’ was a big disappointment for me for just this reason). The truths that underlie these subjects far exceed the capacity of conventional narration which inevitably uses people and events like props to the almighty story. Those biopics which have gone the art film route, wielding the subjective and letting it unfold unrestrained, are the rare gems of this bloated genre. To these successes I add Gus Van Sant’s ‘Last Days’ (the only way Kurt Cobain’s story could have been told) and the more recent Bob Dylan biopic ‘I’m Not There’, taking the individual out of the picture altogether and approaching the subject’s identity as a nexus points of many competing selves.
Watching ‘Into the Wild’ I could not help but think how much it paled in comparison to a film with the same principle storyline, Werner Herzog’s ‘Grizzly Man’. In both, young idealism propel the protagonists to live out their lives in the isolated frontiers of Alaska, and both are in the end overcome by the indifference of nature. The chief difference of ‘Grizzly Man’ is that it is a documentary, one dominated by first-hand footage of Timothy Treadwell as he slowly comes apart, whereas Christoper McCandless is filtered through the performance of Emile Hersch and the artifice of Penn’s vision. There is a huge disconnect with conventional storytelling that is overcome through the direct immediacy of the lived document. Not to get too bogged down in the philosophical, but we behave differently and look deeper into something if it is discerned as genuine then when we are working within the frame of artifice; we possess at least two different kinds of responses. There is that urban legend about an audience watching a movie about a great tragedy in mute awe, but when it is announced that the theater is on fire there is real panic and uproar. So it is with ‘Into the Wild’, filtered through to a safe distance, and ‘Grizzly Man’, which in the long passages of Treadwell talking there is the very real sense of human frailty, a complex person no longer a prop or device to keep a story moving. There is a point in Penn’s film where the real Christopher McCandless is depicted, a single photograph of his time in Alaska, and that single photograph has more potency to instill the subjective experience of his spiritual quest then the entire film combined. Another example of this imbalance between fictional and non-fictional accounts of real people is Herzog’s double take on the life of Dieter Dengler: the fictional account played by Christian Bale in ‘Rescue Dawn’ is removed from any real emotional immediacy whereas the documentary ‘Little Dieter Learns to Fly’, on the very same subject and by the very same director, gets to the heart of the person far better.
I realize I have turned this review of a film into a critique of a genre, but that is where my attention was drawn. Into the Wild is a stunning film that has some admirable things to say, and as a piece of cinema it is a delight to watch. I think it should easily be considered for Best Picture and Best Director at next year’s Oscar ceremony, but it has nothing profound to impart about the great transcendent themes it addresses, and that is a real shame.