Into the Wild (2007)

My colleague was not a huge fan of this, but I always felt there might be something here I could enjoy. This is, in many ways, a very Matt film - it's a (Sean-Penn-helmed) biopic about a young man, Christopher McCandless, who gives all his savings to charity, leaves his family and friends behind, and goes off, 'into the wild', on a long journey towards the Alaskan wilderness. It's the kind of life I might dream of if only I had the courage to contemplate living it. Anyway, did I end up agreeing with my colleague's C+ (from memory) or not?

First, the good. This is a stunningly beautiful film, deserving of being mentioned in the same breath as 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Film. However, Eric Gautier's job here is far less demanding than Roger Deakins' in Jesse James, as the mood approaches wildlife documentary and doesn't have as many of the emotional complexities and themes reflected in Deakins' stunning, expansive and bleak American wilderness. Still, this doesn't detract from the beauty of the images and Gautier should be commended for an excellent job.

The performances are also good. Emile Hirsch (a dead ringer - surely no accident? - for a young Sean Penn) does a good job as the film's protagonist McCandless. William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden are as dependable as always as his despairing parents and the film is well narrated by Jena Malone, who plays McCandless' sister Carine. The film is largely driven, and memorable, however, by a number of shortish cameos, by Vince Vaughn, the beautiful Catherine Keener, Brian H. Dierker and, particularly, the excellent Hal Holbrook, who delivers the film's standout, albeit, brief, performance.

The problem is that that performance also demonstrates how off-kilter the film is, or at least becomes. I don't think it ever quite decides whose side you're supposed to be on. So much screen time and audience energy is invested in McCandless and his adventures and yet you are left with this detatched feeling when it comes to his incredibly selfish interaction with other characters, something not really, or at least not properly, picked up on by the film's narration and, indeed, narrator. This is particularly true of the film's best scene, involving Hirsch and a supremely despondant and emotional Hal Holbrook. who invests it with a genuine and deep pathos. Your opinion of McCandless slides and slies after that point, but you cannot but help feel that it's not supposed to. The last hour or so feels hopelessly unbalanced as a result.

Also, the ending is absolutely awful and flies in the face of much of what the rest of the film has been attempting to say. Clearly this film was made with the cooperation and input of McCandless' family and perhaps this is what they truly perceived to be his 'redemtpion'. It is important to bare these things in mind when you're reviewing a biopic - this is after all about a young man's life - but it equally isn't right to ignore such issues and it certainly doesn't do justice to the film's (admirable) purpose.

So there we have it. If this review feels a little confused, I'm glad, as that reflects how I feel as I've written it. It's worth watching but just expect to have a strong opinion afterwards and to not necessarily feel entirely satisfied. I firmly believe that Penn has a great film in him. This isn't - yet - it.

B- (so the answer to that inevitable question I began by posing is nearly : )

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+