NOT QUITE THE MOVIE OF THE WEEK: Shaun de Waal reviews Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn.
There’s a striking scene in the middle of Into the Wild, written and directed by Sean Penn and based on a true story. The protagonist, Chris McCandless, is illegally kayaking down the Colorado River (without a permit or experience, he travelled more than 700km that way). He has survived the rapids and entered a calm patch, with the wide river winding beautifully between great cliffs of reddish stone. Rounding a bend, he hears some crappy rap music blasting across the water — you can hear it echoing off the cliffs. On the bank he finds a couple of camping Swedish tourists who say they love ‘nature” and invite him for a hot dog.
Chris is nice to this dreadful couple, but in similar circumstances I fear I might have bludgeoned them to death then and there. Before they are even seen, their horrid (American) music is already destroying the serenity of the setting, filling it with the aural equivalent of urban garbage. Is this not exactly what Chris claims to be trying to escape from?
Just out of college, in his early 20s, McCandless abandoned ‘civilisation” for a life on the road, sleeping out in the open. But, like a rock star (and perhaps unconsciously but tellingly echoing the rock band), he took the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp. While his family wondered desperately where he was, he wandered around the United States for a year or two, working in odd jobs here and there, before setting out on his final destination: the icy wilderness of Alaska.
His stated aim in the movie is to be self-sufficient, to live off nature only — hence the guide to edible wild plants and the gun to shoot wildlife for food (what, no bow and arrow?). And, for an amazingly long time, he manages to do just that. Penn’s film makes it clear, though, that the form of ‘civilisation” McCandless is trying to escape is primarily represented by his parents: money-grubbing, neighbour-conscious, lying and abusive. As portrayed by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, they are as pathetic as they are hateful.
So it’s not just about stripping away the layers of socialisation to find some essential self beneath them; it’s about trying to get away from mom and dad, and that seems his more basic motivation. In this respect, Chris is no different from a zillion other young people. What’s different is the extreme solution he proposes to the problem. No, he couldn’t just get a job and move to another state. There’s an element of revenge in his act.
It’s also clear (though Penn doesn’t seem to have thought much about this) that his desire for the untrammelled wilderness is inspired by one of the peak productions of civilisation — literature. Chris is responding to the call of the wild as found in Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and, heaven help him, Boris Pasternak. One is surprised DH Lawrence doesn’t feature on his reading list, but then Lawrence would probably have posited a different kind of nature or wildness to embrace, and this Chris shies away from the deep waters of sex.
The voice-over that strings the storyline together, as the film slides restlessly back and forth in time, is provided by McCandless’s sister, Carine. But is it fictional or taken verbatim from some record reproduced in the book (by Jon Krakauer) on which the film is based?
It certainly doesn’t sound right. It’s too literary, too highfalutin. ‘The weight of Chris’s disappearance was now lying full-length on top of me,” Carine says, or something like that. This doesn’t sound like the urgent, fearful night thoughts of a teenager whose family is falling apart. Its tone reinforces the literariness of Chris’s need to escape, and then encloses his story in more earnest writerly ponderings.
Then there’s how the film is shot. If we are to have any faith in the natural world that Chris wants to escape to, we have to see it: not just in flashes, like someone’s holiday slides, but really see it. The cinematography in Into the Wild doesn’t allow that; it can’t simply let us look at a landscape.
Like Chris, it’s too busy moving around to find what it’s looking for. If Chris wanted to find stillness, in the sense of a natural world free of human noise, as well as an inner peace away from bad parents and family trauma, there’s no sense of it in the landscapes we see here. The film’s view of the wild lacks that very stillness.
Penn’s films as director all contain a strong undertow of melancholy, and it certainly flows through Into the Wild, even if one is not aware of Chris’s eventual fate.
Penn’s earlier film, The Pledge, took the viewer to very sad, dark and deep places; Into the Wild, for all its soulful self-pity and romanticism, can’t get there. Emile Hirsch’s Chris has no depth: he’s a nice-enough guy, it seems, but he’s also callow and unreflective. This makes it hard to care for him, and makes this overlong movie (147 minutes) feel as self-indulgent as he is.