Into the Wild
Contra Ross Douthat, I think most viewers unfamiliar with the Chris McCandless story--people who had never read Krakauer's book, or seen the television specials--would leave the movie with, at the very least, mixed feelings about the kid.
This is an indefensible movie in certain ways, but I enjoyed it anyway. It would have profited from Orwell’s dictum about saints being judged guilty until proven innocent: Sean Penn basically treats Christopher McCandless as the questing would-be holy man he clearly took himself to be, while the other side of the story – about a reckless, charismatic kid who smashed up countless lives while chasing down his bliss, and whose pathetic death was a more-or-less inevitable consequence of his own foolhardiness – slips out involuntarily, between the sweeping landscape shots and Eddie Vedder songs.
I think this misses quite a bit. At the beginning of the film, we meet a guy who we might well confuse for an idealist and a renegade. But that sense doesn't last long. By mid-movie, when he's had a chance to reflect upon his actions, to meet and ignore the advice of older people who have cast doubt upon his plans and questioned his motives, he seems arrogant and spoiled--on the sort of quest only the son or daughter of rich parents could ever feasibly embark upon. And when it's too late, after we learn about the events in his past that supposedly drove him over the edge, he seems like a deeply confused obsessive. It might be fair to say that, by the end, his character has taken shape by packing on details that make him look less like Thoreau, and more like Don Quixote, or perhaps Ahab, but without the white whale.
Throughout the film, he befriends a handful of people. All are older than he is and they understand the world better than he does. All of them, though, listen to what he has to say, and are even able to learn a thing or two. The most important difference between them and him is that he's incapable of doing the same. He's not a vacant person in any way, but he's arrogant and fatally stubborn. Sean Penn obviously brings a lot of baggage to his movies, and, perhaps especially with a movie like Into the Wild, it's unsurprising that some critics will project their impressions of Penn himself on to the character. But I think that entails closing one's eyes to most of the film's long and detailed back story.
Comments
Ross says: "about a reckless, charismatic kid who smashed up countless lives".
I can go with "smashed up 3 or 4 lives" (his two parents, his sister, and, if you want to count him, himself). "Countless?" He touched numerous non-family lives, but in what sense were any of them "smashed"? The Vince Vaughn character seems happy to have known him (and his problems were wholly unrelated to Chris, as far as I understood). The Hal Holbrooke character is broken up by Chris's leaving but (as I am sure he would agree) has no hold over him and no right to expect him to stay. The hippie couple seem improved by knowing him. He does not leave the teenage girl pregnant. What does Ross mean?
(Yeah, I know, why am I asking you. But you are here.)
It might have been more fair for Ross to say, "smashed up a few lives and wasted his own."
My suspicion--possibly way off base--is that people who have reactionary views and assumptions about Sean Penn as a public figure will have a hard time not pasting his face on McCandless'.
Thanks Brian. I did post the same point in Ross's comments so maybe he will say what he means.
I do not think your rewrite clears things up. If it was only his family whose lives were smashed (and I agree that theirs were), then that is what should be said: "smashed up his family's lives and wasted his own".
But as Ross wrote and you rewrote, the implication is the lives of some people outside his family were smashed up (in Ross's case, his words have no other interpretation). I just do not see it. Who is Ross (and now you) talking about? Smashed up how?
(I agree with your point about Sean Penn. Perhaps it is he who has smashed up lives? 8-)
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