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Review: “Into the Wild”
By Kyle | October 31, 2007
Into the Wild review by Kyle Smith
I’ve seen 52 (different) movies in the last 52 days, so I don’t think I’ve been slacking as a film critic, but until today I hadn’t seen Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild.” I was exhilarated and devastated.
The story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), an Emory graduate who turned his back on his beloved sister and his bickering parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) to wander the wilderness and finally meet his doom in Alaska, evidently struck close to Penn’s heart. You can sense Penn and Eddie Vedder, who provides an elegantly stripped-down score, fighting with themselves over the crushing beauty of what McCandless, who restyled himself “Alexander Supertramp,” hoped to achieve and how his selfishness must have rent his family.
The movie is a picaresque, which is to say a series of barely-connected adventures, but together they form an epic of one man’s life. McCandless in the film is a crunchy wanderer who cuts up his ID cards, gives away his life savings, and burns his petty cash to give himself to a love for the wilderness that will turn out to be unrequited. It’s an attractive idea to a lot of men: 200 proof nature, with all its challenges and thrills. McCandless learns to camp and even hunt for his own food, but when he runs short of provisions takes odd jobs such as one with a farmer (Vince Vaughn) or with a couple of wandering hippies who sell books out of their RV. Even this isn’t an extreme enough rejection of materialism, though: he resolves to spend the summer in Alaska, alone, living off the land.
As the film flashes back and forth from his final months in Alaska to his travels around the west, nature seems at first to keep delivering friends and good fortune. He rows down the Colorado river and manages to sneak in and out of Mexico. Yet when trying to hobo his way around on a train, he takes a vicious beating from a railroad man who doesn’t appreciate the added liability of having a stowaway. Even this far away from it all, liability, lawyerspeak, is frustrating his ambitions. And nature becomes a terrible poem that McCandless becomes increasingly unable to read.
Though McCandless is a romantic figure, Penn makes it clear that he is not a hero. He isn’t so much seeking out the beauty of nature as grasping for an impossible, pure perfection that he sees as the antithesis of his troubled parents and their wealth. Late in the movie, he meets an old man (Hal Holbrook, giving a touching performance) who is a devout Christian and knows the outdoors. He says God’s bounty is not in the splendor of nature, but in the intimacy of human relationships–in love. It’s a hard lesson for a 23-year-old, and McCandless doesn’t get it.
Penn seems like the kind of man who would dearly love to wander the continent, but he doesn’t, because of those human relationships. He has a wife and family who need him, and so do we all. When McCandless meets a folky singer (an impressive Kristen Stewart), she practically begs him to be her boyfriend. He refuses because, he says, she’s too young, but the girl is a beauty and it’s hard to believe him. There’s something missing in this man. He’s as alienated from sex as he is from shopping malls.
Both the cruel beauty of the film and this quality of its main character call to mind Werner Herzog’s similar, and similarly brilliant, documentary “Grizzly Man,” about Timothy Treadwell, a nature lover who lived among the bears in Alaska and treated them as big fluffy pets, until they ate him. Treadwell claimed, not very convincingly, to have a girlfriend (a woman he brought along who also died but whom he almost entirely ignored in his many video diaries). He too seemed uninterested in sex, or any other kind of human interaction.
You could call both men wilderness autistics; they communicate better with a mountain stream or an animal than with other people. But that’s their tragic flaw. ”Into the Wild” is one of the most exacting, thoughtful and meaningful films of recent years, one that artfully merges several great conflicts–man vs. nature, man vs. society, man vs. himself–into one spellbinding and saddening experience.
November 1st, 2007 at 4:58 pm
KS — You are a terrific writer, and that was another perceptive, elegant review. But what on Earth is a “crunchy wanderer”?
November 1st, 2007 at 5:08 pm
“what on Earth is a “crunchy wandererâ€Â?”
A new energy bar in a range that also includes Chewy Wanderer, Peanut Butter Wanderer, and Chocolate-coated Crunchy Wanderer.
Could Kyle have been going for ‘crusty’?
November 1st, 2007 at 5:52 pm
“Crunchy,” in my experience, is shorthand for earthy-crunchy, granola-and-yogurt-loving peacenik/hippie/anti-materialist,likely to be a graduate of Hampshire College and certainly a fan of organic food and hallucinogenic drugs.
Possibly it’s a regional term.
Crusty, in England, means about the same thing. (See “Hot Fuzz” for its denunciation of “Crusty Jugglers.” Who I believe played just before the Crunchy Wanderers at Woodstock.)
November 1st, 2007 at 10:15 pm
“Crusty Jugglers” is, I believe, an octogenarian mime troupe. As for “crunchy”–I never heard that. I think maybe it is regional. But I kind of get it, now that you say it.
November 6th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Finally kyle and I agree.It was a beautiful film and a great depiction of
the story of Christopher McCandless.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I appreciate the mccandless observations, but i’ve just finished reading “The Grizzly Maze” and “Among Grizzlies,” two books on Timothy Treadwell, and wanted to append some info short-changed in Herzog’s documentary.
His relationship with bears was much more complicated than “big fluffy pets” despite how some of Herzog’s video footage plays side of Treadwell up. Treadwell certainly behaved in his own eccentric way to pass the time, but he also had a unique talent to discern bear behavior and intentions, often forced into split-second decisions (whether respectful retreats, holding ground or bluffing an attack) when a bear got to close to him or began to charge. His knack held up for thirteen summers, but all along it was a risky business to convince himself that he too was bear, as he often remarked on video and wrote in his memoir “Among Grizzlies.” More than anything else, McCandless and Treadwell shared an independent spirit and over confidence grown from previous successes. However, sometimes it is also terrible luck–running into a desperate, potentially mentally-ill bear or (spoiler alert!) eating seeds previously unknown to be poisonous.
Also:
Treadwell actually had several girlfriends over the years and never seemed to have an aversion to sex, self-described and collaborated in interviews with friends.
From what I gather, he had selective problems with humans depending on whether they were sympathetic to his mission and trips to Alaska every summer or not. His best friend in Alaska, Joel Bennett the filmmaker, was amazed that a person who enjoyed attention and social interaction would go into the bush for months at a time thirteen years in a row like Treadwell.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
[...] superbly written “Into the Wild,” I am just going to post my response to a film review by Kyle Smith of the New York Post. It is largely in reference to a brief paragraph on Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent thirteen [...]
December 31st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
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