Into the Wild (2007)

 
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 06, 2011 4:57 pm    Post subject: Into the Wild (2007) Reply with quote

When I first saw Emile Hirsch, cast as Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, knowing the subject of the movie, I thought he was miscast. He was too baby-faced, too much the little American boy who would never grow up.

By the middle of the movie, though, he seemed just right for the part. Chris McCandless WAS a boy who would never grow up.

Born into prosperity, he graduated from Emory University with a bright future ahead of him–law school, with the funds readily available from dad.

The trouble was that Chris was rebelling against the materialism of his family–and, we find out, against his parents’ quarreling, which appears to have been explosive and frequent.

So he heads out for Alaska, first wandering around in the West and running across some hippie colonies, complete with nubile-looking naked women.

He makes a few friends, in passing–an older hippie couple who clearly have more insight into Chris (calling himself Alexander Supertramp) than he has into himself, and an older man who puts out some very clear signals to the effect that Chris would be well advised to forgive his family.

Much of the story is told by his sister.

When we see Chris making his law-school fund check over to a charity, we can shrug it off, but once he’s out on the road and we see him burning his money, we have to wonder if his self-destructive streak is winning out.

Some of the action in the story wasn’t clear to me until it was explained later on: that Chris finds he is stuck on an island, through a failure to cross a river with impossibly formidable rapids, and there are no animals on the island–so he is reduced to eating plants. But the problem there is that he has no real knowledge of which plants are safe to eat, and we see him consulting a book of Tanaino folklore to find out he’s just eaten a very poisonous plant.

This story was based on real life, and Chris’s family are listed in the credits.

A very sad story but well done, on the whole. I could have done without the slow-motion scenes but only because they’ve been overdone in other movies.

This movie shows spectacular scenes of impressive parts of the West. It’s worth sitting through it for those alone.
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