Demob Happy

Wildly overrated

4/10

‘Into the Wild‘ is an apaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling true story about Christopher McCandless, a middle-class graduate who dropped out and hit the road in search of “ultimate freedom” in Alaska. Sean Penn’s treatment of the story is an embarassingly self-righteous and romanticised interpretation that says much more about the director than McCandless himself.

Alot has been written about the film’s ‘beauty’, and the cinematographer has done an impressive job aestheticising the American landscape. But a film about a fatal underestimation of the of ‘the wild’’s inherent inhospitability warranted a less classic, National Geographic style approach and something a bit more brutally honest. However, the whole film panders to McCandless’s (aka Alexander Supertramp) portenteous diary entries - written in neat block capitals as to be nice and clear for the viewer - about being an “aesthetic voyager”, as well as his sisters estimations that everything he said “had to be said”. Thus McCandless is the Byronic hero (a quote from Lord Byron even opens the film) dispensing, but never receiving, graduate-level literary wisdoms to everyone he meets in the same breath as denouncing his university education as a pointless and oppressive fraud.

‘Into the Wild’ is crawlingly obsequeious to Chris, it’s two-and-a-quarter hours padded out with slow-motion action shots of him canoing the rapids (against the will of the petty bureaucrats who try to stop him!) or showering au naturel, and montages of him compensating for his solitude by making himself laugh with his own wacky jokes. All this as Eddy Vedder, late of Pearl Jam, provides a soundtrack of textbook “alt” country, all husky baritone and rootsy acoustics; all the bland aural signifiers that say ‘America’, ‘Big Landscapes’, and ‘Open Road’ with the subtlety of a Route 66 juggernault.

An interesting counterpoint to this film is Werner Herzog’s fascinating documentary ‘Grizzly Man‘ about the similar Timothy Treadwell, who suffered an even grizzlier fate (pardon the pun) in Alaska. The difference between the two films is startling: whereas Sean Penn idolises McCandless with all the slobbering sycophancy of a teeny-bopper, Herzog creates a complex portrait of a man ultimately deluded into believing he had an affinity with bears because he was in fact running from something, probably himself. When questioned - quite astutely, and by a man nearly three times his age - what he is running from, Penn’s McCandless tells him to make “a radical change of lifestyle”.

In another scene he offers an almost girlfriend the pearliest of wisdoms, “If you want something, just reach out and grab it”; a parting shot gratefully and tearfully received. Elsewhere his presence heals the rift in a marriage whose protagonists are given sympathetic portraits not afforded to McCandless’s parents. These ageing hippies, like the elderly widower he befriends in the later stages of the film (who even offers to adopt him), are impelled to act as surrogate parents to Chris, but somehow end up being fathered by him - at least in Into the Wild’s interpretation of the story.

No such sympathy of portrayal is afforded to Chris’ real parents, who are persistently blamed for all the ills of a materialistic, oppressive family life and thus a materialistic and oppressive society. Chris’s sister provides a merciless tirade against their parents - who are not given a voice to defend themselves - in monologue through several stages of the film. It is sweetly spoken but nonetheless hectoring vitriol that at one point reminds us that the McCandlesses are not worthy of our compassion - despite their bitter sorrow at Chris’s disappearance - because it was really rather their fault that he had left in the first place. Maybe the McCandlesses were not very nice people, but nobody deserves to lose a child and the appropriation of the film’s voice by an apparently vengeful family member leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

One particularly embarrassing scene witnesses Chris scale an Alaskan peak as the camera spins around him, arms aloft in a kind of unironic Di Caprio-King-of-the-world moment. Scored by some quasi-spiritual yodelling, it’s dizzyingly sycophantic, as if Chris had invented the mountains themselves. Other scenes, including Chris joining a would-be-but-underage girlfriend on stage at a traveller camp concert, are so cringingly mawkish you don’t know where to look.

But it is Sean Penn, much more than Chris McCandless (”I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don’t want one”), who is to blame for this patronising and self-important movie. Having wrote and directed the screenplay, Penn takes full responsibility for this massively imbalanced portrait which refuses to countenance the notion that perhaps McClandless was a troubled, self-destructive soul, by turns both victim and victimiser of his family. By idolising him, it makes short work of Chris’ ultimate delusion, that he fatally underestimated the wilderness he so romanticised. The film is like being locked in a room with Penn - presumably taking a break from preaching people about the evils of the world or awarding the Palme D’Or to films he considers politically righteous - for over two hours; and you can’t get a more damning verdict than that.