Into the Wild
By Jason Revill
I wake up every day and enjoy living in a place where the sun makes the trees seem ablaze with autumn colors and a herd of deer and wild turkey stop outside my door. I have never really answered the call of the wild, because I have always lived close enough to it as is. Between that and an upbringing that while my needs were met (much of which due to my father’s green thumb), there was not much need for “things”. It makes it nearly impossible to by someone a gift on Birthdays or at Christmas when you ask what gift they would like and the inevitable answer is “nothing”.
Based on the true story by John Krakauer, Into the Wild is essentially about the death of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who after graduating Emory University gave away his savings to OXFAM and went off to find himself by hitchhiking across the United States. Leaving his family, possessions and anything attaching himself to his former life, McCandless adopted the moniker of Alexander Supertramp and moved around only staying one place as long as he needed to, while working his way to his goal of living out in the Alaskan wilderness. He eventually makes it to the solitude of his ultimate destination, but the freedom it provided came with a price.
To be completely honest if it wasn’t for Emile Hirsch, I would damn near hate this movie. He is just so likeable and he is able to so embody youthful optimism that Into the Wild is almost palatable. Once again Catherine Keener puts in a stellar supporting performance with unknown Brian Dierker as her hippie husband. If this movie had been about the relationship between the three of them, I think I would have liked it far more. Hal Holbrook is incredible as a lonely war veteran, but unfortunately the writing in his segment is lazily reminiscent of the Hallmark Channel. Holbrook himself is so good, however, that he comes out unscathed by it. With these people doing such fine work, it dumbfounds me that right in the middle you have Vince Vaughn and Zach Galifianakis as roughnecks in some of the worst casting I have ever seen. There is a time and a place for Vaughn to come out and be a jackass, but this just isn’t it. It’s either a total mistake or such a heavy handed attempt at levity that either way doesn’t work. Galifianakis on the other hand may look like some semi-kempt mountain man, but his comedy style makes it seem as though the joke here is on the casting director.
If Penn had portrayed McCandless as being less of a modern messiah and more motivationally ambiguous, the film would have been a greater success, instead as it is, McCandless comes off as more of a spoiled brat with daddy issues. By blowing up his familial relations and pushing this idea of him as some wandering seer who brightens the lives of everyone he meets, he eventually becomes tiring. You’re talking about a kid who had every advantage and threw it all away, because of what? His parents were materialistic and mean? In a world where ninety-nine percent of its population would kill for the chances this kid had, is there anything more selfish and more importantly wasteful than throwing those opportunities away? He moves from place to place preying on people emotionally as his surrogate family and taking whatever he needs for his own survival; meanwhile he left his sister back home to suffer what would have been his fate.
This picture of McCandless is more of a bum than I had expected to see. With each person he meets he finds another troubled soul who could be helped by a quote or two from Tolstoy or Thoreau. This is essentially a child who knows nothing with Hirsch’s baby face driving the point home. McCandless thinks he has the whole world figured out, but his only knowledge of it is from what someone else wrote about it. Let’s face it, a well placed quote is just the novelty t-shirt of the pseudo-intellectual and McCandless’ arrogance in the face of his own ignorance played a heavy hand in his own demise.
For a film that wants to drive the point so firmly home in regards to its main character, Into the Wild is all over the place in pretty much every other regard. Penn never really commits to either being straight documentary style to make this a close up character piece nor does he go for the epic grandeur that a film entitled Into the Wild might benefit from. In doing so, he cuts the legs out from underneath the film as a whole. By adding elements like Vince Vaughn doing the same thing as he would in a movie like Dodgeball, while at the same time having Hal Holbrook sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck reciting what appears to be leftover dialog from Cocoon, large portions of this film completely miss the mark.
After about an hour and a half of Into the Wild, it was pretty obvious how the next hour was going to go and sadly I had to sit through it. There will definitely be a very loyal, very pretentious audience for this film. As for me, the idea of running off in some attempt to shrug off the world’s superficial materialism doesn’t really appeal to me. I guess I could put up a tent in my back yard.
The Grade
- Story: C
- Acting: B
- Visuals: B
- Originality: B
- Enjoyability: C
- Overall: C+
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