'Into the Wild' both stirs and irritates
The story of Christopher McCandless, as recounted in Jon Krakauer's 1996 nonfiction bestseller "Into the Wild," isn't terribly convoluted: After graduating from Emory University in 1990, McCandless dispensed with all his worldly possessions, cut himself off from his family and took off on a cross-country trek inspired by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, those self-reliant souls who longed to be at one with nature.
In the spring of 1992, however, McCandless journeyed into the Alaskan wilderness, and he never came out. After making a series of mistakes — including eating poisoned foliage and misjudging the depth of a stream — he died from starvation.
From this skeletal narrative, director Sean Penn has fashioned something unexpected: a grandiose, 2 1/2 -hour paean to the restless American spirit. Filled with lush, widescreen vistas and swelling rock anthems by Eddie Vedder, "Into the Wild" seeks to transform McCandless' saga into myth. How you react to it — whether you find the film transporting and transcendental, or merely pretentious and wildly overdirected — will depend almost entirely on your reaction to the main character. Does McCandless represent the best of American youth, or is he just a venal, self-absorbed punk who needs a good, swift kick in the pants?
We first meet this young man in 1992 in Alaska, when he spies an abandoned bus — a spot that hikers would use occasionally for shelter in the freezing wilderness. He's rail-thin and bearded, and it's clear that he's already journeyed far from civilization. As played very impressively by Emile Hirsch, with a ragged energy to his step and a fiery glint in his eye, he seems unusually content. He's come to exactly the place where he wants to be.
Penn then launches us back two years: McCandless was desperate to break away from the orderly, traditional life of his unhappily married parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt), and he told them nothing about his plans for escape. We follow him on a series of misadventures across the country, as he briefly goes to work for a South Dakota man named Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn) and later falls in with a hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker).
All of this unfolds as an unhurried pace, as cinematographer Eric Gautier ("The Motorcycle Diaries") floods the screen with one ravishing, image after another. As if to remind us that we're watching myth and not a mere movie, Penn divides the story into chapters with titles like "Manhood" and "The Getting of Wisdom," with each section another step forward in this young man's epic bildungsroman.
Some of this, perhaps inevitably with a director as self-serious as Penn, is crushingly dull; you've seen one image of Hirsch staring contemplatively into the sun-baked horizon, you've seen them all. But stretches of this movie are magical and arresting, such as the sequence in which McCandless strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly man (an unforgettable Hal Holbrook).
And yet, as the film carries on (and on), it's also hard not to shake the feeling that we're watching a kind of bourgeois porn: a wide-eyed celebration of an over-privileged preppy and his self-absorbed angst.
Despite having access to McCandless' diaries, Krakauer didn't really craft a psychological portrait of him or explore the possibility that he might have been severely depressed. Instead, he bought wholesale into McCandless' romantic notions of himself, as a kind of modern-day Jack Kerouac.
Penn, to his credit, at least acknowledges this young man's selfishness, by portraying McCandless's parents and sister (Jena Malone) with tenderness and humanity — these people were simply desperate for a phone call from their child. But we're still supposed to admire McCandless' ambition and especially his unwillingness to march to the beat of society's drum.
Well, that's one way to look at it. Another, though, is to see McCandless as a spoiled brat, and to see this grandiose and magisterial movie as a bid for his canonization. "Watching Into the Wild," you feel both stirred and irritated, moved and exasperated. Penn has done an extraordinary job capturing one young man's urgent need to live a life less ordinary. You just wish that the young man in question wasn't such an annoying little pisher.
Director: Sean Penn Stars: Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener Length: 149 min. Rated: R (strong language, nudity) HHH (out of 5)