Sean Penn Goes “Into the Wild”

This past weekend I saw Sean Penn’s latest film, Into the Wild, an adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer. I had initially wanted to write a comprehensive review of the film, focusing on what I felt were its many brilliant parts. But these past few days, in perusing the NY Times website, The New Yorker, and various other publications replete with audience and critic reviews of the film, I have been surprised, and in some cases appalled, by the misunderstanding with which many people have reflected on it.

I am not going to give a plot summary here, though I may at a later time, because plenty are already available both on the internet and in print. Instead, I wish to examine some of what has been written about the film, but do not think that I am zealously defending or promoting it, indiscriminately slandering negative reviews and praising positive ones; to be truthful, I came across just as many positive reviews that seemed to wholly miss the point, as it were. Among the complaints that I came across, however, were that the film “was entirely too visual,” “entirely missed the point that this was a spoiled brat who became disillusioned with his parents,” “was filled with sophomoric content,” “was wrapped in a balloon of fanciful rhetoric that floated off,” “was a feculent speck of masturbatory naivete,” “was the last thing Chris would have wanted,” and so on.

These were all reviews that indicated to me that their writers were either preoccupied while watching the film or else didn’t watch it all. I would like to focus on the last comment first, because it opens up a discussion about creative intent versus biographical documentation, which will lay the groundwork for further comments I would like to make. The claim that McCandless would have been dismayed by the way Penn made the film is clearly hypothetical, but it is offensive because it treats the film as an attempt at historical recapitulation rather than creative vision. If you see the film and believe that Penn was trying to reconstruct McCandless’ life like an archaeologist tries to reconstruct the inscriptions on the Dead Sea Scrolls, then this comment has some merit, but if you accept that there is a natural gap between a story and its imaginative recollection, purposefully filled in with creative interpretation, then this comment is meaningless.

Unfortunately, a great many of the reviews and comments that I have read seem to proffer this notion that Penn either missed the point of Christopher McCandless or that if McCandless were still with us, he would disapprove of Penn’s work. In his review in The New Yorker, David Denby argues that Penn, in his zeal for character, perhaps, failed to recognize that the young journeyman protagonist was really a spoiled, wayward young man whose actions in the movie were largely contemptible. Needless to say, if Penn had felt that way, the movie would never have been made, but Denby’s stodgy, cynical logic might well engender such other criticisms as that Shakespeare missed the boat on what a brat Prince Hamlet was, or Salinger on his famous journeyman, or that Carlos Castaneda stupidly never realized that Don Juan wasn’t a real person, or that Faulkner failed to grasp that Thomas Sutpen was a Machiavellian SOB. In all examples, including that of McCandless, what the person was like in real life cannot automatically determine their worthiness for creative depiction. Otherwise, it would never be worthwhile to make movies or write books about flawed or unsavory people.

To Penn, in other words, McCandless is not merely a person, but a character. It is moreover apparent that he saw McCandless as an alternate of his young, angry self, and that in some capacity, there but for the grace of God went he. The film is a portrait, not vaguely moralizing, preachy or didactic, but keenly aware of the hardships and mysteries of coming of age. Penn even subtly facilitates a reckoning of his protagonist as more than a boy-become-man – a personality bordering on sainthood. A middle-aged hippie that McCandless befriends along his wandering trail asks him, “You’re not Jesus, are you?”

The answer is no, but his epiphanic moments in the solitude of the wilderness, his parabolic sayings and episodic encounters with people all in need of friendship if not help, his floating down the river in familiar nude cruciform shape, and his inevitable, almost prophetic, and yet completely senseless death are all suggestions to the contrary. Whatever the interpretation, Mr. Penn’s reverence for the character of McCandless reiterates the importance of not trying to glean some bubblegum moral from the film or lamenting the discrepancies between the film and the book.

It is equally popular to see McCandless as the godchild of the old ascetic naturalists like Muir, Thoreau, Emerson and McKibben – a pure romantic individualist, a seeker after truth, and following from the Lord Byron quote with which Penn opens the film, a wanderer who “loves not man the less, but nature more”. It is hard to think of another film that embraces the American landscape with such ardor and enthusiasm, or that sets up that landscape, in all its beauty and brutality, as a place of salvation rather than displacement. The wild is a character, that like all the others in the film, teaches Chris about himself, but it is the only one, in the end, that forcibly takes anything back.

This is an incomplete understanding of McCandless, however, because it does not account for the searing circumstances that motivated him to abandon his possessions, his family, his identity, and lose himself in nature. The grief of his family, almost another character in itself, is briefly portrayed in the beginning of the film, and then intermittently referred to thereafter, though it is implied that the severity of it was a chief reason for Chris’ departure. The film’s first line of dialogue, “That’s about as far as I can get ya,” uttered by an unnamed character who drives Chris deep into the Alaskan snow, maintains an eerie presence throughout the film in relation to Chris’ primal fear of settling down in one place. Penn is careful not to to beat us over the head with it, but there is a strong sense that the young McCandless, by the time of his departure, was emotionally fried by this unhappy family existence. Upon learning of the lies and deceptions of his parents, Chris’ childhood became a lie to him, his home ceased to exist, and in the absence of both, he tried to convince himself that he had moved beyond the need for either.

Chris was a disturbed young man, in essence. While there was some nobility in his quest for truth, his reasons for undertaking it were all wrong. Bound up in his own pain and conviction, he failed to see the signs of love along the way: strangers who grew fond of him, who wore their hearts on their sleeve for him, who tried to reach out to him.

Only at the end of the film, when, tragically, the wild had exerted its will past the point of no return, did Chris realize the indispensability of shared happiness and human relationships. But the point here is well-taken, and Chris’ conclusion somehow tastes very fulfilling. It is at this point that our eyes are opened to one of the essential propositions of the film: neither a disturbed soul nor a tragic ending preclude the possibility of a life spent rejoicing in the lightness, fresh air and infinite adventures of the wild.

I fear that those who reviewed this film negatively because they found McCandless’ character perturbing, self-absorbed, bratty or in some other way unappealing, may have missed the forest for the trees (no pun intended) and misunderstood some very fine film art. If any concession can be made, it is that this film is a narrative anomaly. It doesn’t bask in the glory of trivial plot twists, surprise endings, or unappealing protagonists. Instead, it elevates the hero – in every sense a lone individual set against the sea of near-insurmountable obstacles – not only while recognizing his tragic flaw but because of his tragic flaw, a take that is unpopular in certain circles and incomprehensible in others. This one might have gone over better in the age of Euripides, Sophocles or Shakespeare, all of whom knew well that the the story’s tragedy is found not in the denouement, where the hero lies dead on the bare stage, but in the preceding period of sheer and temporal bliss. This film is about the path of the hero, the successive small tragedies that he unwittingly does unto himself, and his final, self-redeeming epiphany that comes just a moment too late to do him any good.

If you understand the film from this ‘time out of mind’ perspective, and accept that Penn, to a certain extent, went into the wild himself to discover this story, it takes on a new air of importance, brightness and expansive possibility.