Into the Wild is Sean Penn's fourth feature film as a director, following 1991's The Indian Runner, 1995's The Crossing Guard, and 2001's The Pledge. Those pictures were intimate, relatively small-scale character studies. Wild, the story of a young self-made adventurer and his tragic end, adapted from a best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, is by far the most wide-ranging and difficult production Penn has taken on as a director. And on that level, it's a protean piece of work. Penn has often said that he dislikes acting and would prefer to direct full time. Into the Wild is impressive enough to give him license to do just that.
Chris McCandless was a son of privilege who walked away from his family and society after donating his life's savings to OXFAM. Seeking transcendence — or perhaps merely to escape from a dysfunctional family — he cut all ties, renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp," and wandered the American wilderness until he wound up in the woods of Alaska, where he survived the winter only to die of malnutrition. Krakauer's account of McCandless is both deeply personal and deeply ambivalent, while Penn's perspective is less skeptical; he creates a kind of hero's journey, giving the picture chapters titled "Youth," "Adolescence," "Manhood," and "The Getting of Wisdom."
Emile Hirsch is an aptly appealing and/or irritating McCandless, emanating a certain purity and an unshakeable determination. He's in almost every frame of the film, and he's got a lot to do and go through. Many patches of Into the Wild brought to mind Come and See, a 1985 WWII film from Russia directed by Elem Klimov and lavishly praised by Penn, about a Bellarussan teen caught up in some of the unspeakable horrors of that war. Like that picture, Into the Wild has an unstinting eye; just as Klimov's camera never turns away from horror, neither does Penn's; in conveying McCandless's experiences, it subjects us to some grisly sights. When, for instance, McCandless shoots down a moose and fails in his efforts to preserve its meat, the audience is treated to a sequence of shots — of gouging and pulling followed by a maggot infestation — that kind of define the phrase "tough sit." Likewise Penn's experimental freedom with storytelling techniques — shifting points of view, different voiceovers, use of varied film stocks — bespeaks a profound debt to European cinema in general. This is not foursquare Hollywood moviemaking.
But it's got a cast that any Hollywood producer would envy, all doing good work as the various people touched by McCandless during his journey; Holbrook is particularly memorable as a retiree who teaches McCandless leatherworking, while Harden and Hurt do their best in the thankless roles of McCandless's scapegoated parents.
For all its achievement, though, the picture's got a whiff of self-righteousness to it. More than one viewer of the picture at the Toronto Film Festival, where it premiered, noted, "Where does Sean Penn get off telling anyone that it's noble to burn your money?" or words to that effect. Into the Wild's overt, insistent sincerity does make one wonder what a dramatic ironist with a genuine gift for such material, such as Werner Herzog (whose work from Aguirre: The Wrath of God to Grizzly Man examines man's sometimes fraught interaction with nature), would have made of the tale.
VIEW: 2007 Toronto Film Festival premiere
WATCH: Into the Wild trailer
