Into the Wild

Sean Penn is a director whose films can be best described as serious and earnest. It's also a pretty fair description of the man himself. At the 2005 Academy Awards, after host Chris Rock had made a joke about the fact that Jude Law had appeared in 6 films that year Penn came on stage to present his award and prefaced his introduction with a fairly unnecessary defence of Law (although Rock was completely unfunny, it was only a joke).

Penn's resume as director spans 16 years and has seen him tackle 4 films, starting with The Indian Runner, whose plot synopsis on IMDb reads "an intensely sad film about two brothers who cannot overcome their opposite perceptions of life." His next project, The Crossing Guard, is synopsised thus: "Freddy Gale's life was never the same after his little girl was killed in a hit and run accident." His third film, The Pledge, is a look at a man haunted by a promise he can't keep and his slow decline in mental acuity. It's depressing as hell but it does feature a knock-out performance from Jack Nicholson, who would make my number 6 in 2001, which makes him extremely unlucky since he was also my number 6 in 2002!. Despite his ability in eliciting great performances from his leads, Penn's directorial record is so dour you almost want Penn to tackle a Richard Curtis script just to see what he does with it.

6 years since his last feature film, Penn brings us an adaptation of Jon Krakauer's factual book of the journey undertaken by Christopher McCandless. McCandless graduated college with near straight As but instead of following a path into Harvard to study Law, he gave all his money to OXFAM and left home. McCandless rebranded himself as Alexander Supertramp and ventured to live in the wilderness, with the ultimate goal of making it to, and living off of the land in Alaska.

In many ways this is an atypical Sean Penn film. In many other ways it is an archetypal Sean Penn film. Whilst it lacks the intimacy of his previous material and possesses a grandeur that is now unique amongst his work, Into the Wild, like his other films, possesses a central character tortured by inner demons that he cannot, and will not overcome. Penn obviously knows how to direct actors and here he has cast Emile Hirsch as McCandless. Hirsch is practically in every frame of the 220 minute running time and it's an impressive performance. He does not dominate the screen like Nicholson but is certainly very enigmatic, even when his character is a little irritating (like dishing out sage advice to people more than double his age). There's an interesting decision about two thirds of the way through the film when McCandless breaks the fourth wall, which seems to suggest that Penn had done so much research for this and was so true to the details of the actual events that the film could very well have been McCandless' own video account of his amazing journey.

Supporting Hirsch are the likes of Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt as the worried parents, Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as a couple of hippies he meets during his travels, and, most notably, Hal Holbrook who excels as a friend he meets along the way. In fact Holbrook was so good that I was irked that he was restricted to so little screen time.

Penn's film never quite reaches the level of great, although there's plenty to admire throughout. There are however an equal number of rather poor decisions that make this a film that is less than the sum of its parts. It needs editing. I didn't understand the need for the sister's voiceover. There was too much slo-mo. The titles annoyed me, and the way the postcards he wrote were written on the screen in yellow as opposed to being narrated was just bizarre and weird.

There are enough quibbles to keep this from being anything other than a solid film. It's neither great nor bad but rather somewhere in between, but at least it is a very noble effort, unlike much of the dreck released in theatres these days. Into the Wild is in cinemas everywhere now.

C+