Had he not starved to death in the back of an abandoned bus, Christopher McCandless may very well have achieved fame by less fatal means. After all, one doesn’t punt away their law school tuition and spend two years roving the country as a dashing vagabond without a healthy dose of celebrity panache. Who knows? Had he caught a couple of breaks, McCandless might have parlayed his ill-conceived stint in the Alaskan wilderness into a book deal. Or, God forbid, an extreme survival reality show on the Discovery Channel.
Alas, McCandless didn’t survive, so the responsibility for telling his story fell elsewhere: first to journalist Jon Krakauer, whose best-selling non-fiction book, “Into the Wild,” chronicled the young man’s doomed adventure; and now to writer-director Sean Penn, whose exquisite big screen adaptation weaves suspense and reverie into an unforgettable tale of self-discovery.
Played with Oscar-worthy charisma by Emile Hirsch (“Alpha Dog”), McCandless was nothing if not an “immoderate” personality, as remembered by his sister-cum-narrator Carine (Jena Malone from “Donnie Darko”).
When his parents, a pair of status-conscious stiffs played with just the right corona of estranged tension by Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt, offer to buy him a new car to celebrate his graduation from Emory University in Atlanta, McCandless immediately launches into a self-righteous diatribe against materialism and privilege. His latent bitterness toward the folks is only half the problem; from top to bottom, with the exception of the sister, this is a family that has no understanding of each other.
As if in protest, McCandless rips himself off the grid, disappearing from his family and discovering America under the whimsical pseudonym “Alexander Supertramp.” Along the way, a pattern emerges: McCandless befriends lonely people – a middle-age hippie (Catherine Keener) mourning the disappearance of her own son, a teen (Kristen Stewart) with a jail-bait crush, a widowed war veteran (Hal Holbrook, in a masterfully sad performance) – and leaves them, a brilliant but cruel beam of light to illuminate their inner voids.
Directing for the first time since his morose dead-child drama “The Pledge” (2001), Penn keenly captures the grandeur and open spirit of 1970s road movies such as “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces.” Though the story takes place in the early ’90s, the movie even looks like it was shot in the ’70s, from the wardrobe to the earthy visual hues. Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder helps complete the illusion with a handful of original folk songs.
All of it leads to Alaska and McCandless’ fated bid to “kill the false being within.” But to which false being does he refer? The being that pines, briefly, for a taste of yuppie privilege during a lay-over in Los Angeles? Or the being that declares, without irony, that happiness has “nothing to do with human connection”? And does McCandless, no matter how alienated, really have to blunder into the Alaskan bush to find out? He does, argues Penn, with such gentle conviction that we’re ashamed to doubt it.
Contact the writer: 800-536-3251 or couthier@freedom.com
