Review: Into the Wild

* * * ½

Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener, Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Marcia-Gay Harden, Jena Malone. Directed by Sean Penn. Screenplay by Sean Penn, based on the book by John Krakauer. Rated R. 140 minutes. Paramount Vantage.

Attention: Spoilers

Director Sean Penn’s stirring Into the Wild takes you into the heart of the wild, and inside the heart of a young man who graduated from Emory University in 1992 with, by all accounts, a promising future. He died of starvation two years later in remote Alaska after embarking on a road trip that would take him across the country, unencumbered by society or family, free from the restrictions and hypocrisies of the material world before facing an unexpected, bitter reality.   

Since his death 15 years ago, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) has emerged a cult-figure in recent American history, a would-be modern beat poet searching for meaning; a socially conscious soul driven by illusions of a "sick society," venturing penniless across America to an unfortunate end.

The product of a distant, NASA engineer father (William Hurt) and well-meaning, enabling mother (Marcia Gay Harden), McCandless graduated from college and promptly donated his $24,000 life savings to charity, changing his name to "Alexander Supertramp," dropping out of the world (unbeknownst to his shattered parents) and setting about on an odyssey that would profoundly affect the lives of those he met en route.

The film is as much a travelogue as a character study, and McCandless’ adventure crosses the Arizona desert where a flash-flood destroys his car, through the Grand Canyon where he paddles a kayak down the Colorado River and into Mexico, to a hippie society where a melancholy RV book dealer (an effective Catherine Keener) becomes a kindred spirit and a young folk singer (Kristen Stewart) falls for him, and on to a temporary job for a sympathetic farmer (Vince Vaughn). Though he eschews human connections, he nevertheless goes out on a limb after warming up to a closed-off older man (a moving Hal Holbrook) in need of companionship.

Penn’s film, which he also wrote from John Krakauer’s biography of the same name, is certainly a respectable, sometimes powerful family drama and road movie, if not quite the classic man against nature tale it might have been. Into the Wild is less than perfect, with a protagonist who initially seems to waver between pretension and social awareness, not assisted by the film’s shuffled time structure which requires considerable screen time to warm to. There is also questionably intermittent narration incorporating sister Carine’s (Jenna Malone) revelations of family secrets that led to her brother’s disdain for their parents.

Hirsch, the talented young star equally at home in risky independent films (The Mudge Boy) or dressing up mainstream comedies (The Girl Next Door), comes into his own with a wide-eyed naivete that later turns to impressive desperation during McCandless’ struggle to survive, losing 40 pounds for the film’s harrowing later stretches. The closing scenes are played with a quiet, matter-of-fact finality that is sobering, and Hirsch allows McCandless to seem, at once, a remarkably confident young optimist and a vulnerable victim of his own foolish wanderlust.

The film’s best performance comes from the great Hal Holbrook as a grandfatherly confidante who befriends Alexander too late, providing the film’s most poignant passages. The lonely, aged leather engraver takes an immediate liking to McCandless, whom he embraces as a surrogate grandson and would-be protégé, which was simply not to be. Theirs is a complex friendship, with the younger finding the support of a grandfather and learning to understanding unconditional friendship. In a performance that seems destined toward an Oscar nod, Holbrook’s sensitivity is deeply felt as the pair reluctantly part near the end of their journey.  In one beautiful moment, a winded Holbrook climbs a steep, rocky hill, to join his young friend at the top, memorably combining tough and tender notes.   

Shot by Eric Gautier with an unshowy attention to the Alaskan wilderness and fine feel for the modern American West, the film is a visual treat, and with original music by Pear Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Penn has given McCandless’ tragedy a handsome, absorbing milieu.

Into the Wild is an unsentimental, affecting chronicle of someone who went looking for his corner of the world and became a casualty of his own youthful ideals.

Recommended.

-Lee Shoquist