| INTO THE WILD (2007) : S.Penn : 7+/10 : added 'second opinion', 21.Sep. |
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 COMMENT Sean Penn's fourth film as a director - five years after his much-underrated The Pledge - is the based-on-a-true-story tale of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) - who walked away from an affluent family background in search of open-road adventure and ended up in an abandoned bus in a remote corner of Alaska. Penn's script, adapted from Jon Krakauer's controversial non-fiction best-seller, is a chronological jumble of scenes from various key stages in McCandless's life, narrated by the man himself with further comment from his increasingly concerned sister (Jena Malone) back home in Virginia. The resulting film is an impressionistic collage of sequences and fragments, beautiful to look at - McCandless perpetually seeks out the most 'unspoiled' corners of his country so that he can commune with nature (shades of Timothy Treadwell!) - and impressively edited from swhat must have been a vast amount of disparate footage. McCandless meets a wide range of people on his travels, some of them played by the actual folk themselves, most by fine character-actors including a particularly touching Hal Holbrook (justly Oscar-nominated for his delicate work as a life-scarred old bird who want to take Chris under his wing). But McCandless himself is somewhat infuriating company - immature, solipsistic, forever quoting lines from his favourite authors, with a surly-teenagers' petulance crossed with a misanthropic form of sixties drop-out hippiedom. The picture seems largely content to accept and even celebrate McCandless's prickliness, to the extent that it often comes across as being shaped by his own self-image and world-view - are the movie's faults therefore Penn's or McCandless's? The picture's ambitions are sky-high - but, as its protagonist also discovers, noble intentions aren't always enough on their own. There are moments of magic and transcendence here - albeit of a kind more successfully essayed by Terrence Malick in Badlands (both films make much of the disjoint between what we're told via voiceover, and the reality which we're shown by the camera.) And McCandless's peregrinations take us to corners of the USA which are all too seldom chronicled in Hollywood productions. Penn's empathy for his material, and for McCandless's quest, are palpable enough - and, though Into the Wild is choppy and overlong, he often achieves the kind of lyrical/gritty hobo-poetry to which he and McCandless so vigorously aspire. POSTSCRIPT I don't want to write a full review of Into the Wild until I see it in a cinema, on the big screen which it demands - as David Thomson has pointed out, the conventional TV screen is unfair to all films, and cruel to great ones. I can't say conclusively yet whether Into the Wild is a 'great' film - critics I respect and often agree with, such as Olaf Moeller and Vladan Petkovic, have acclaimed it as some kind of masterpiece - but from what I saw last night on a 14" portable (my usual DVD 'monitor', a 24" telly, decided to go on the "fritz" just as I started to play the film), my instinct would be to say not. I have to admit that, as well as having to resort to a small-screen telly, I found it hard to watch the movie with my usual critical objectivity - being such a passionate admirer of Ron Lamothe's documentary on McCandless, The Call of the Wild (see below). That's a low-budget, video-shot affair which, ironically enough, I have seen on a very large cinema screen, after programming it into the Bradford International Film Festival earlier this year - the first time the picture had screened outside the USA. Since then it's played at several more venues around the world, and everyone I know who's seen it - most of them fans of Into the Wild - has been pretty much knocked out by it. Oddly, despite having been around for almost a year, it still isn't very widely known and doesn't even have an IMDb page yet. If I was inclined towards conspiracy theories, I'd be inclined to wonder whether Lamothe's movie, which is far from complimentary about Penn or Into the Wild's studio Paramount, has been in some way "suppressed." One would like to believe and hope not - but stranger things have happened. Neil Young 6.Sep.08 -------------------------------------------------------------------- USA 142m (BBFC timing of DVD) director : Sean Penn (The Pledge, The Crossing Guard, The Indian Runner.) editor : Jay Cassidy (The First Snow, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, etc - including each of Penn's films as director) seen 5/6.Sep.08 Sunderland (DVD) Ron Lamothe's The Call of the Wild can be ordered by clicking on the image below  my Jigsaw Lounge review of the film from March: THE CALL OF THE WILD : [9/10] : Ron LAMOTHE : US 2007 : 108m The short, controversial life of "spiritual voyager" Christopher McCandless (1968-92) - focus of Jon Krakauer's 1996 book Into the Wild, recently filmed by Sean Penn as a $15m narrative feature - is the subject of this top-notch documentary. Even audiences totally unfamiliar with McCandless's tragic, much-chronicled story will likely find themselves utterly absorbed by director/narrator/editor/cinematographer Lamothe's journey into his subject: a journey which is simultaneously geographical (he retraces McCandless's hobo-ish wanderings around the USA), philosophical (topically examining the nature of freedom in today's America) and bravely self-analytical - at several stages he measures himself against the ideals, achievements and inadequacies of his near-contemporary. DV-camera-toting one-man-band Lamothe's proudly wayward path even crosses that of Penn and his elaborate production on several occasions - inadvertent intersections which amusingly cast Hollywood's notions of creative "independence" in a savagely unflattering light. Frequently hilarious, consistently intelligent and, in the end, deeply moving, The Call of the Wild heralds the exciting arrival of a fresh and bold new voice in American non-fiction film. A second opinion on Into the Wild... INTO THE WILD [9/10] Based on true events, Sean Penn's film relates how Christopher Johnson MacCandless (pitch-perfect Emile Hirsch) journeys through America until he meets a tragic destiny in the wilds of Alaska. It's an impressive road movie - but also a lot more besides. Graduating from Emory University at the age of 22, McCandless (1968-1992) has an invitation to Harvard Law School - much to the delight of his comfortably-off (but not exactly well-heeled) parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden.) But all is not entirely rosy: McCandless and his sister are the product of a deeply dysfunctional duo - the father self-absorbed and hyper-perfectionist, the mother borderline hysterical. Rejecting his cosy, bourgeois upbringing, McCandless - whom we deduce has been something of a "spoiled brat" - forsakes all material considerations in order to pursue his concept of freedom. Burning the last of his cash, he sets out on a trip through some wild - and some less-than-wild - regions of the vast American terrain. He changes his name to "Alexander Supertramp" - inspired by William H Davies' 1908 book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (and not, presumably, the American soft-rock band Supertramp, as this might have ruined his ever-so-rebellious self-image.) Trudging on, 'Alex' meets colourful characters such as hippie couple Rainey (big-screen debutant Brian Dierker in a role which Donald Sutherland or Kris Kristofferson might have filled 20-30 years ago) and Jan (Catherine Keener, excellent) - whose fading love he manages to re-ignite. In dire financial straits, he takes a job at McDonald's - until they order him to wear socks - and works on a farm in Arizona for Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn, underused), to whom he writes numerous letters during his subsequent journeys. During these peregrinations he meets a solitary senior-citizen, Ron Franz - played by Hal Holbrook in a wonderfully touching turn. Holbrook was rightly nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award - though that gong was always headed to Javier Bardem. Speaking of Oscars, the film's strongest point - the cinematography by Eric Gautier, (The Motorcycle Diaries, Irma Vep, A Christmas Tale, Kings and Queen, Intimacy), which so brilliantly captures the beauties of the American wilderness - somehow wasn't recognized by the Academy. Jay Cassidy's outstanding editing was, as it happens, nominated - but, as with Holbrook v Bardem, stood little realistic chance against Christopher Rouse's stunning work in The Bourne Ultimatum. The point of the film is perhaps that McCandless's well-intentioned rebellion - and his soulful yearning for freedom - were, in the end, beneficial for everybody... except the person doing the rebelling and the yearning. This perhaps amounts to what could be construed as a conservative but heartfelt stand-point for (and from) Penn - who has finally found a proper directing approach after some early misfires and 2002's underrated, (but nevertheless slightly disappointing) The Pledge. Penn took a while to really blossom as an actor - around the time of Mystic River and 21 Grams - and is also proving something of a late-bloomer in his directing career as well. Vladan Petkovic September 2008 |
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