Classic Movie Review: 'Into the Wild'

The classic on the September 28th, 2020 episode of the Everyone's A Critic Movie Review Podcast is Sean Penn's devastating drama, Into the Wild.

When I first heard about Christopher McCandless I assumed he was some nut job hippy. Here's a guy with everything in front of him who threw it all away to be a bum, I thought to myself. I believed that he must have been deeply disturbed and that people who adopted him as a symbol of freedom were merely making a hip fashion statement. Indeed, more than a few poseurs did adopt Christopher McCandless as a romantic folk hero but Jon Krakauer wasn't one of them.

Stumbling on the story of this charismatic drifter, Krakauer tracked Christopher McCandless from when he disappeared from his family in 1990 and to where he was adopted by hippies, on to when he worked at a grain elevator in South Dakota and on to when a grandfatherly old man somewhere in the northwest made Christopher feel like family. What Krakauer discovered was sad, in the end, but along the way it was also uplifting, extraordinary and even life affirming.

The lessons that Chris McCandless learned, chronicled in Jon Krakauer's extraordinary book, are brought vividly to life in Sean Penn's exceptional film Into The Wild.

Few directors over the years have captured single minded obsession quite as well as Sean Penn. His main characters are people of such dire and dogged determination and focus that they can't see the forest for the proverbial trees. For instance, in The Pledge Jack Nicholson played a cop so obsessed with a kidnapper that he loses everything in pursuit of what amounted to a shadow.

In The Crossing Guard it was Nicholson again this time as a father so obsessed with the man who accidentally killed his daughter that his revenge consumed him. The story of Christopher McCandless suits Penn's obsessive impulses. McCandless was so focused on his goal that even as other paths to true happiness presented themselves, he turned towards his obsession and it cost him his life.

Chris (Emile Hirsch) was a privileged kid who had his future laid out before him. Harvard law school awaited him. He however, had a different plan for his life. Donating his savings and destroying his identification, Christopher McCandless shed all modern convenience and simply walked off into the setting sun. Wanting only to get to Alaska and live in solitude, in the wilderness, alone, McCandless made his way across the country picking up friends and odd jobs along the way.

The story of Into The Wild is not why Christopher McCandless sought to be alone in the woods but the journey that took him there and the lessons he should have learned along the way. Lessons that sadly only really set in for McCandless when it was too late. With his single minded determination Chris appears to have passed on chances at true joy and fulfillment to realize his Alaskan fantasy.

As directed by Sean Penn, Into The Wild is mesmerizing. The path of Christopher McCandless is dotted with the important things he should have learned along the way and the tragic ways in which those missed opportunities manifest themselves in his last moments. The emotional developments between Christopher McCandless and the people he meets on his inexorable march toward fate are the defining moments of this extraordinary film.

Two of these supporting performances truly standout. Catherine Keener plays a hippie traveling the countryside with her old man Rainey (Brian Dierker). They pick up Christopher as he hitchhikes and temporarily they become a family. Traveling to a commune in the Utah desert we find that though they travel together and seem to love one another, Keener's Jan struggles with her feelings for Rainey. Christopher offers loving insight for both of his new friends but he is soon gone and we are left to wonder whatever came of these lovely souls.

The other standout, and arguably, the one who steals the film, is Hal Holbrook as Ron. Offering Christopher a ride, the two develop a grandfather-grandson relationship that broke my heart. Ron and Chris bond in a wonderfully sweet way and, like with the hippies, we glimpse a life that may have been perfectly satisfying, even fulfilling for Christopher if he were not so single minded. HalHolbrook is devastating in his dignified grace and honest care for this strange young man and he has a beautifully easy and loving chemistry with Emile Hirsch.

Emile Hirsch deserved an Academy Award in 2007. It’s one of the great Awards robberies in film history that he wasn’t even nominated for this performance. Hirsch captures the beautiful innocence and almost malevolent single mindedness of Christopher McCandless and he imbues the tragic true story with the breath of real life. His final moments, alone in his makeshift Alaskan home, are devastated. Just recalling the last looks of Hirsch’s Christopher chokes me up.

The element that makes Into the Wild an iconic and desperately underappreciated classic is Eddie Vedder's stellar music. Vedder’s soundtrack is haunting and gorgeous. The soundtrack is achingly emotional and Sean Penn deploys the music throughout the film masterfully. Listen for his last song in the film, just before the inevitable tragedy. If you can endure these scenes, and Vedder's haunting cries without tears then you are a stronger person than I am. I'm not ashamed to admit that I wept and even now, as I write this, the memory makes my eyes water.

Into The Wild is one of those powerfully moving moments at the movies where we once again understand and recognize why we go to the movies. it's to be moved, to be touched, to connect with the story of a fellow human being. Into the Wild film is instructive of the need for love, for human connection and of a life lived with purpose even if that life ended in such devastating sadness.