Into the Wild is the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who died
at 24 in the Alaskan wilderness, when he was off on his dream adventure to the
last frontier. Chris graduated from Emory University in 1990, told his parents
he was packing up a few things for law school, then disappeared from the face
of the earth into a hippie/homeless subculture for a couple of years, always
in search of himself. He read Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Jack London and wanted to
do what they had done: to deny himself comforts and to sustain himself from
day to day on his own or with genuine people, away from the artificiality of the people he
had grown up and gone to school with.
He met and befriended many people along the way: a farmer in the upper
Midwest, a retiree in the desert, some hippies on the road, and others.
Everyone he met seemed to like him. Everyone seemed to admire him. But nobody
seemed to understand him. The drop-outs he met along the way knew what their
fellow drop-outs were like, and Chris didn't fit the profile. He graduated
with honors. He was a top athlete. He had a tremendous work ethic. He was a
regular guy who liked to knock back a few beers. He was not particularly
rebellious or disgruntled. He had no signs of mental illness, nor was he a
chronic malcontent. He simply chose
to heed the advice of his hero, Thoreau: "If a man does not keep pace with his
companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to
the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Chris heard a
different drummer, and marched to that beat, all the way to his death.
When an Alaskan named James Gallien dropped Chris off at the head of the
Stampede Trail, he knew the kid was in trouble. Chris's gear was far too light
to survive what he wanted to do. Chris was not only unconcerned about his
inadequate preparation, but he cavalierly left his watch and his map in
Gallien's vehicle, and headed into the wilderness without a compass or radio,
carrying no food but a ten pound sack of rice. Gallien's heart went out to the
idealistic kid and he forced Chris to accept a pair of waterproof boots.
It was miraculous that Chris managed to live out there for 113 days. He did
so only because he got the boots, and because he found an abandoned city bus which
he did not know of before he began. That bus, placed there by hunters,
contained a bed and a stove and provided shelter from rain, snow and wind. The
existence of that bus in the middle of nowhere, far from any roads, was in one
sense a blessing of providence. In another sense, it spared Chris from being
killed by exposure or grizzlies, but did so only to extend his life long
enough that he would die a prolonged and lonely death from
starvation (or perhaps food poisoning from eating the wrong plant.)
It was, in fact, miraculous that Chris even lived long enough to get to
Alaska in the first place. He probably should have died at least three earlier times in his short
life. One summer in his college years he almost died in the other temperature
extreme, while testing his ability at desert survival. One time he got a kayak
out in the open sea and barely managed to struggle back to shore. A third time
he went whitewater rafting in the mighty Colorado River, by himself, with
neither training nor experience. Each time he could have died, perhaps should
have, but survived. By the time he made it to Alaska he was far too confident
of himself and his ability to escape from any predicament. And that confidence
was almost justified. When he was ready to leave, he managed to backtrack
effectively the same way he had come in, but he ran into one major snag. The
tiny creek he had waded across in the frozen earlier months had become a
raging torrent when the rains came and the snows melted off the mountains.
Unable to cross the river, Chris was trapped behind it, and no game animals were
trapped with him.
Writer/director Sean Penn told the story as objectively as he could,
neither condemning nor rhapsodizing Chris. In order to
keep the story true to reality, Penn used a meticulously researched source
book as well as the recollections of Chris's family. The source book included
the wilderness diaries of Chris himself. As auteur, Penn did precisely what he
should have done: he kept the narrative accurate and easy to follow. Since
Chris's pre-Alaskan life was separated into many unlike segments, Penn used
the Alaskan conclusion as the framing device and broke that narrative up with
long flashbacks to the other completely unrelated adventures which preceded
Alaska, each of which had a different cast of characters, in the manner of a
classic picaresque novel. Each time Penn brought the story back to Alaska,
he had told us a little more about the man in the bus, until we finally
started to change our minds about a guy who at first had seemed like an
arrogant know-it-all prick. By the end we could see what had made Chris
unique, and why people always seemed drawn to him. The flashback device also
allowed Penn the writer to milk the emotion of Chris's death without wallowing
in his suffering. In fact, the death was treated quite matter-of-factly, but
it is deeply affecting to hear Chris in the flashbacks talking about what a
great time he's going to have in Alaska. There are few things more affecting
than optimism which we know to be baseless, but the poignancy in the script is
derived from the optimism itself rather than the later misery. A nice bit of
scripting, that, and a real sign that Penn is mastering subtlety. The
direction is marvelous in another way. Sean Penn has always been great at
drawing top performances from actors, and he did so again here, from many of
the performers, but especially
from Hal Holbrook, who received an Oscar nod. Although Holbrook will turn 83
in a week after I am writing these words, he had never been nominated for an
Oscar. He has won four Emmy awards and acquired six other Emmy nominations,
but those all occurred in the period 1967-78, so he's had a dry spell which
Sean Penn helped him end.
Holbrook played "Ron Franz," the only major character in the film who is
hidden behind a pseudonym, as he was in the book. The movie didn't really show
why "Franz" wanted to remain anonymous, but the book did, at the end of
Chapter 6:
"When Alex left for Alaska" Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep
his finger on the shoulder of that one. I told him that boy was special. But
he let Alex die. So one December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced
the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I
couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a
boy like Alex."
Holbrook didn't get to deliver that powerful scene, but he had others just
as affecting.
I like this film very much, but I'll be honest and say that I would have trimmed
the running time below
two hours because I occasionally got a little restless during the film's 150-odd minutes. I
do understand why Penn wanted to use as much of Chris's life as he did. In
the last two years of his short existence, that boy had more adventures in more
places than most of us will have in lengthy lives. Even as he realized he
was dying, Chris wrote a note to posterity which mentioned how great his life
had been, and that he had no regrets. Penn wanted to show us the full expanse
of the adventures in that life, and to develop the background that led him to
those adventures, as well as the characters he met along the way. There was a lot to show,
and it consisted of good stories in picturesque and widely diverse locales, so the director fell
in love with his story, too much so to lose any of it. I can't blame him.
Now that the film is over, I still don't know what made Chris so reckless or what
caused him to hear a different drum. I don't really see any connections
between the various parts of his life. His childhood experiences were
sometimes difficult, but not unusual, just the kinds of things that happen to
millions of children every year, children who do not grow up to be anything
like Chris McCandless. Like everyone else who knew Chris, the director of this
film liked him and admired many things about him, but didn't understand what
made him so reckless or what kept him from calling his sister to say he was
OK. Nobody seems to know those answers, or even to have a good guess. As a
result, I didn't really gain any insight into what made Chris
the way he was, but I do know he lived his life the
way he wanted to, and that it was an interesting life to watch. One could say the same thing of Chris that my dad once told me of
himself in his old age, "Everything about life is great - except the duration."
