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Sean Penn's Adaption of "Into the Wild"; Starring Emile Hirsch
Sean Penn's passionate adaptation of John Krakauer's book Into the Wild, conjures up an experience close to Jack Kerouac's On The Road meets Thoreau's Walden. The film glorifies the journey of Christopher McCandless; a young idealist who ditched his Harvard bound life for a great Alaskan adventure. Some have asked whether McCandless's mythic trip, under his alias Alexander Supertramp, was a suicide dressed as self-righteous spiritual transformation.1 This realty check is skillfully avoided by Penn's screenplay, thus becoming a passionate homage to one man's detachment from society. One scene sums up what would've been a typical reaction to anyone who announced the adventurous vagabond intentions of McCandless. Sitting in a bar with farmer Wayne Westerberg (played by Vince Vaughn), McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) rants about the sickness of society and why he desires the complete abandon of the Tundra. At this point in the tale McCandless is already well into poverty, by society's standards, but living a rich life on the road. Farmer Westerberg humors McCandless' daydreaming, giving him something like, "Yea Man; Society", with Vaughn's gifted drinking-buddy comedy. "Yea Man; Society." The drunken finger pointing of humanity's ailments summed up by institutionalized consumerism and hypocrisy. Yet McCandless is drunk on a literary substance; Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Jack London. His high is an intellectually fueled call to the wild, subtracted from society's equation of family, credit cards and automobiles to find summation as a being of nature. The film juxtaposes McCandless' entry into Alaska, cutting back to his hitchhiking and kayaking escapades along with memories of dysfunctional family life. Without having read Krakauer's book, the film unravels this soul's glorified path into Alaska's epic wilderness. If one has read Krakauer's Into the Wild, the film offers a more intimate attempt from the imagination of Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch's breakthrough performance. Krakauer's account is equally passionate, but draws from the concerned lives McCandless had touched or abandoned. What is particularly striking about the film is the effort to show how McCandless was embraced throughout the country. He left his family with no way to reach him and never so much as sent a postcard from the road. Only in his early twenties at the time, everyone he met on the road played an accepting family to his free spirit. From the Hippie surrogate parents he encounters, (played by Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker) to the leather craftsmen who offers to adopt him (played by Hal Holbrook). Or even the trailer park songstress (played by Kristen Stewart) who's crush on McCandless becomes sibling affection that replaces his sister back home. These relationships stand as a counterpoint to a series of scenes of McCandless's destitute in Los Angeles. His freedom on the road is reduced to a beggar who won't settle for the kindness of social services. All these embodiments of America's societal wasteland embrace McCandless and in the most cliché sense, love him by setting him free. We are given the impression that his immediate family, save his sister, would have locked him up before letting him go. This dynamic of the screenplay captures more than just McCandless's personal struggle, but that of all Americans who wish for comfort on the road and nature's nourishment. In some ways it is a testament to the hitchhiker, the one without the axe and body-bag, who seeks approval through his thumb. The American sensibility in us wants to pick this wild spirit up, but we are consumed by fears of homicide, thievery and body odor. In all too real, yet fitting symbolism, McCandless turns an abandoned bus into a makeshift shelter in Alaska; his hitched ride on the inward road to spiritual awakening.
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Contributor's Note
Read more on this review at the backlink provided.
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The Film Adaptation of John Krakauer's Book Into the Wild
| More by Jason Cangialosi
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May, 2012
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