Into the Wild

I saw "Into the Wild", Sean Penn's screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book this weekend and I can't recommend it enough. A few things you all will enjoy about rushing out and seeing it:

• It's a gorgeous movie. Just about every dramatic climate across the United States--the plains in the spring, the desert in the summer, Alaska in the...cold--set the backdrop for almost every scene in the movie.

• The actors are fantastic. Every last one of them. Depending on how you look at him, Emile Hirsch looks either like a brown-haired Leonardo DiCaprio or a thin Jack Black, but it helps that he's not nearly as famous as either of those guys. He's featured in almost every scene, and because you probably haven't seen a ton of his acting before, you get to know him well without feeling like you already kind of knew him. It's a testament to his talent that you never really tire of his character, about which more below.

• Eddie Vedder's songs are over the top. I have an embarrassing, lingering affection for Pearl Jam, so friends of mine won't be surprised that I endorse this soundtrack. But it's a work apart from the Pearl Jam oeuvre--folksy road music almost entirely--and matches the narrative better--creating more synergy--than any soundtrack I can think of in recent years.

Chris McCandless/Alexander Supertramp is the sort of character somebody like me was born to hate. I worried going in that "Into the Wild" would be the feature film version of "Grizzly Man", which was a technically sound documentary, but about a man who was so unlikeable that the whole enterprise just collapsed on to itself. Instead I left the movie (as I didn't the book) with a sense that, as selfish and narcissistic as McCandless must have been, he was also naive and kind and intelligent, and there really are several ways to look at what he did. It's been a few years since I first heard his story, and read the book, but what Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch have done quite well--at least in my mind--is turn him into somebody who reminds us of our wilder, more idealistic friends, and even of ourselves as we have probably all been at times.