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Movie review: “Into the Wild”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
There’s a right way and a wrong way to become one with nature. “Into the Wild” is an example of one person’s attempt that went profoundly wrong. Most people turn their backs on civilization after having spent some time contributing to its perceived evils and wanting nothing more to do with enhancing the world’s miseries.
But, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) got all the taste he needed from a solid middle-class upbringing with flawed parents (William Hurt; Marcia Gay Harden) and an adoring sister (Jenna Malone). Chris appears destined for great things after sailing through four years at Emory University.
Bolstered, however, by an immersion in the philosophical ideas of Thoreau, Tolstoy, Byron (I love not man the less, but nature, more) and what appears, at first, youthful wanderlust and sowing of wild oats, Chris disappears from his Atlanta student apartment. His sister speculates, in mournful voice-over, as “breaking away with characteristic immoderation.”
Carine McCandless is our tour guide to as much of the soul of her brother as he let her see during the years they spent together. As someone who knows nothing about what is happening to Chris between the time she sees him at graduation and two hunters find his body in a derelict bus two years later, Carine does her best to come to terms with her sibling’s fate, because she “understood what he was doing” seeking “emancipation from material excess.”
It turns out it’s a bit more complicated than Chris’s revulsion for the trappings of what is considered the good life. At some point after learning of paternal indiscretions, Chris came to doubt his own legitimacy. Seeking a place where he can most fully express himself without any outside influences except those he chooses himself, Chris tramps through the country, meeting other dropouts and free spirits, while moving inexorably to his rendezvous with the impartial tyranny of the unpopulated Alaskan forest.
With elegant craftsmanship, the actor Sean Penn directs his adaptation of the popular Jon Krakauer book, charting the intersections of Chris’s life, on his journey into oblivion. This includes people coping, with various degrees of regret, resignation and hope, the consequences of their own flight from or imprisonment by the demands of human community and all the possibilities it holds for joy and sorrow.
Whether seen as grand folly, misguided suicide mission, mythic declaration of freedom, Chris’s odyssey and this film engage the heart as well as the imagination in admiring and sorrowful empathy.
