2 reviews

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Anon. November 29, 2007

This is a remarkably poignant piece of cinema. On paper, it looks like just another road movie/voyage of self-discovery, but the story is told with a scope and sensibility that makes it much more powerful than that.

The real-life protagonist, Christopher McCandless, clashes with his parents' expectations of him following graduation, and hits the road. With his mind set on the wilds of Alaska, he hitchhikes through the gorgeous American scenery and encounters characters that glow with a touching earthiness. The story is as much about their unfolding as it is about the hero.

In fact, McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) is difficult to pin down. He reveals little of himself directly, but we get moments of insight from the beautiful narration by his sister, and the oddly effective insertion of pieces of the literary texts that he inspires himself with. Although McCandless is himself cagey, he has a naivety that wins over the people he meets, and I was overwhelmed by the sincerity of the performances as these relationships unfold.

This production has echoes of Walter Salles' beautiful and touching "The Motorcycle Diaries", which is the tale of the early travels of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. McCandless is certainly more self-indulgent than the Cuban rebel (indeed basically a middle-class kid rejecting society's materialism and hypocrisy), but I've no doubt many of us have voiced the wish to do what he does and leave it all behind. With absolute moral conviction he pushes himself far beyond sensible limits, and earns our admiration for it.

Credit must go to Sean Penn for having been able to capture so much warmth and drama in such a restrained manner. Combined with some elegant cinematography and quirky visual editing this makes for a striking and very rewarding experience.

This is a remarkable film, which is all the more powerful for letting the viewer draw a lot of their own conclusions.

It tells the true story of Chris McCandless, who vanished from his familiy's life shortly after graduating from college, gave his savings to Oxfam and set off, as the title suggests, into the wild. Narrated in part by the character of his sister, who fills in some of the back story, the film covers the last three years of his life as he heads towards his destiny in Alaska.

McCandless, who adopts the unlikely name of Alexander Supertramp, is a curious character, so much like the rest of us in some ways that it's almost hard to follow what it is that makes him go to such extremes in defining how he wants to be. For someone so determined to be immersed in nature, his motivation seems very cerebral and isolated, much of it coming from his small range of favourite books.

He is mainly delineated through the other characters he meets on his travels, all of whom are remarkable, and remarkably played, by wonderfully ordinary looking folk. Their generosity and sense of displaced community serve to highlight how "Alex" while perfectly amiable, and capable of genuine affection and admiration, just doesn't quite get the whole people thing until it's too late.

The film is beautifully shot, the landscapes are stunning, and while long, it doesn't drag, as the well judged jumps from chronological order keep deepening the viewer's knowledge of what is happening in the Alaskan scenes. This is an assured directorial debut from Sean Penn, and one might readily echo his gratitude to McCandless's family for allowing the film to be made and themselves to be portrayed so unflinchingly.

Mr T 5 Feb 2008