Susan Granger’s review of “Into the Wild” (Paramount Vantage)
Sean Penn has adapted Jon Krakauer’s book about a rebellious, 22 year-old Emory college graduate, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who gave away or destroyed his money, cut off all ties to his family, tramped around the country and wound up alone in the Yukon wilderness, where he died in August, 1992.
Among the first people McCandless rejects are his troubled but caring parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) and devoted sister (Jena Malone). He’s then befriended by a South Dakota wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn), an aging hippie (Catherine Keener) and an elderly widower (Hal Holbook) – who act as surrogate family, trying to dissuade him from taking off for Alaska to live off the land.
When McCandless finally arrives in the wilderness – stubbornly ignorant about survival skills – he stumbles across an old, abandoned Fairbanks school bus that’s conveniently been converted into a shelter. By whom we’re never told. He settles in, lopes around the landscape, reads Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau – and slowly starves to death.
What’s bizarre is the way writer/director Penn idealizes and never questions this self-destructive, totally egocentric adventurer, as though there were something admirable about his foolish, reckless, anti-social behavior. McCandless’s romanticized character is saved from being insufferable by the open-faced geniality and kind intelligence radiated by actor Emile Hirsch, who became emaciated during the course of the filming.
Visually arresting, it’s nevertheless photographed by Eric Gautier as if it were a car commercial – one of those scenic wonders where the newest model is perched atop a mountain peak, as if that had any relevance to the consumer’s driving experience.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Into the Wild” is a bleak, pretentious 5 – with the pathos stretching a tedious 140 minutes.
