Wandering the paths of America BA #3

Into the Wild (2007), directed, written, and produced by Sean Penn, is about the journey of Christopher Mccandless, a college graduate, who is seeking the more meaningful things of life in Alaska. The story is told in segments rewinding and fastforwarding whenever it chooses, which seems to make more sense than telling it in a linear fashion.

The beginning of the movie starts somewhere at the end of Christopher’s journey, then skips forward to his leaving his parents after a stilted and unhappy graduation dinner. His departure looks more to the audience like an act of selfish rebellion, but with the help of flashbacks to Chris’ past, and the voiceover narration by his sister explaining their home-life, our perspective of Chris and the necessity of his journey changes. Un-wanting of material gifts (“things, things, things, things,”) Chris burns the cash in his wallet, abandons his car, and gives the rest of his savings originally intended for Harvard Law to Oxfam America. His parents have no idea that he is gone, and as soon as they catch on, he is already two weeks into his adventure.

Based on a true story, the movie captures the haunting reality that some people’s lives are more than they can bear, and it takes re-investigating nature in order to feel right again. The camera acts as the eye of an observer, which Chris sometimes even breaks the cinematic “fourth wall” to look at, and is supposed to create a rugged and natural point of view, which to me, seemed distracting and achieved quite the opposite. Regardless of that, though, the film also featured beautifully spare music, which set the tone perfectly for his journey through the modern-day wilderness of America. Coupled with breath-taking cinematography, I was left feeling touched and very pensive after the movie had ended.

We get a sense of his character and wild desires for adventure, and we truly root for him, but I was forced to question my own point of view on this extremist method of discovering oneself. At the end he discovers from a nice old man that once you forgive you start to love, but I discussed the implications with my fiancé, Scott, of throwing away all that your ancestors had achieved, the cyclical nature of success, and the level of selfishness just to discover that.

I always love movies that get me talking afterwards, but despite the good discussion, I decided it wasn’t my cup of tea. The cinematography was good, the quiet dialogue was excellent, but the length of the movie (it runs two and a half hours) and the fact that I had to watch such a lonely character was a little tortuous and disturbing for my soul. The movie was broken up into chapters as if in a book, and I felt myself thinking “we’re still on Chapter two? How many chapters are there going to be?!”. If it had been distilled into a one and a half hour movie, we may miss out on some of his adventure, but it would have distilled the message into a more powerful statement. Overall, it was a cinematic delight, but I think the term “you can love something and not like it” rings very true for Into the Wild.