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Answering the call

An excellent portrait of a young tramp
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April 23rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Go west, young man. Emile Hirsch plays wanderer Chris McCandless with style.
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Into the Wild


Directed by Sean Penn
With Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Brian H. Dierker, Vince Vaughn, and Kristen Stewart

By Rachel Shimp

For the Post

More than 150 years before Christopher Johnson McCandless burned his Social Security card and headed toward the wild West,  the Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “There is a society, where none intrudes / By the deep sea, and music in its roar / I love not man the less, but Nature more.”

The opening narration of McCandless’ story is carried on these lines. And while his documented favorite authors included Tolstoy, London and Thoreau, Byron’s poem is a perfect fit. After all, the autobiographical Pilgrimage birthed the concept of the “Byronic hero” — a sophisticated, intelligent and self-destructive outsider.
McCandless, a 22-year-old college graduate in 1990 when his adventure begins, is all of those things and more. His story has been known since 1996, when Jon Krakauer painstakingly researched and pieced together the final years of McCandless’ life for the biography Into the Wild. Told through the dual filters of that work and of Sean Penn’s direction, the film is both an irresistible visual diary of one man’s quest and a meditation on the misguided (or just plain reckless) idealism of a generation.  
In one way or another, every generation has wanted to escape. People have always felt compelled to leave behind an existence perceived as unsatisfying and materialistic — the most enduring example of all being Thoreau’s Walden. And in the years since McCandless’ adventure, movie audiences have become acquainted with real-life characters such as Canada’s Troy Hurtubise, who in Project Grizzly built a suit that would let him get close to bears, and Timothy Treadwell (Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man), who just had to touch them on the nose.
Into the Wild differs — and fascinates — because the subject isn’t so obscure. He’s like your friend, your boyfriend, your brother. He’s in his right mind. However, while Treadwell spent 13 summers being crazy and courting bears in the Alaskan wilderness, McCandless barely gets off the grid before things start to go wrong.
He’d probably disagree on that point. Two years is a short time, and McCandless used them well, apparently turning setbacks into moral victories whenever possible. Car broke down? One less material concern.
One of the first scenes in which we meet McCandless, played with spirit by Emile Hirsch, and his family (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt) is after his college graduation, when they offer him an expensive gift. “Things, things, things,” he groans. His sister (Jena Malone, playing 15 but looking older than Hirsch) pulls his trouser leg under the table, suggesting it’s not the first celebration to be tainted with such friction. Her voiceover narrates most of the film. It’s sympathetic to his attitude, but wounded by a vague sense of abandonment.
Penn directs the story in a series of flashbacks like this, which always return to McCandless in his most permanent home during his trip, the “Magic Bus.” There he’s got perfect solitude, and a magnificent view of Denali, the highest mountain peak in North America. How he made it nearly to that pinnacle is the beautiful part of Into the Wild. To a great soundtrack composed by Eddie Vedder, we follow McCandless’ footsteps across America as he encounters places and people that make indelible impressions.
The scenes of his life in South Dakota, where he works at a grain elevator under Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn), are gorgeously shot at dusk and dawn, reminiscent of Days of Heaven. McCandless meets a hippie couple early on, and reconnects with them later in Slab City, California, a desert camp for RV owners and squatters. Penn films the area with affection for its real-life inhabitants; he understands what they’re doing and gets it just right.
Hirsch’s McCandless can come off kind and open-minded at times and condescending at others. He returns people’s courtesy, but seems to remain beyond their reach when it comes to emotions. His beliefs are all that matters. They’re unshakeable.
In that respect, Penn has done a marvelous job. He shows a young man who wants to trust people but doesn’t trust himself to grow up without becoming a jerk. So he runs away to find his soul — and gives himself a fantastic hobo name. Byron would be proud.
Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com
 


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