The Most Morbid Hero Worship

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In the early 1990s, Christopher McCandless, the 22-year-old scion of an affluent, deeply dysfunctional suburban Virginia family, sharply and fatefully diverged from the path that his parents expected him to take and, forsaking his worldly possessions and attachments, embarked on a solo journey via the American road and rails into the remote Alaskan wilderness. Now Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn, in his latest turn behind the camera, has structured a dramatized account of McCandless’s life from Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction best seller, “Into the Wild.”

If Mr. Penn has demonstrated one thing in his three prior feature-length outings as a director, it’s that he is not afraid of a downbeat ending. His previous full-form directorial credit, 2001’s “The Pledge,” concluded on a note so authentically dire and honestly open-ended that it didn’t seem possible that the film was a product of focus-group-happy, alternate-ending Hollywood. If the press notes for “Into the Wild” are to be trusted, I am in a small minority of literate Americans who haven’t read Mr. Krakauer’s book. For my fellow initiates, it’s sufficient to say that the denouement of “Into the Wild” fits right alongside the rest of Mr. Penn’s filmmaking résumé.

The opening of the film, however, is another story. In order to set up a 147-minute narrative that interpolates the full span of McCandless’s (Emile Hirsch) two-year journey, with a separate chronology focused on the nearly four months the young man spent living alone in an abandoned bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, and a flashback-intensive guided tour of the McCandless family’s contentious history conducted by Chris’s sister Carine (Jena Malone), Mr. Penn begins the film about a half dozen times. By the time the film’s opening credits finish rolling, we’ve seen Chris’s mother, Billie (Marcia Gay Harden), wake from a dream in which she has heard from her long-absent son while Chris rides a freight train and a separate timeline on the last leg of his journey to Fairbanks, Alaska, been treated to multiple time- and place-orienting titles, heard Chris’s own voice-over narration, and listened to an overwrought, emotionally explicative song written and performed by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.

Like “The Pledge,” in which Mr. Penn seamlessly cast non-actors alongside pros, “Into the Wild” bears a strong actor’s big-hearted affection for characters and the people who play them. The film’s sprawling condensation of Chris’s fight for survival in Alaska, how he got there, and those he met along the way, makes for a broad and full canvas of American lives that Mr. Penn fills admirably. Vince Vaughn and Zach Galifianakis convincingly blend in among real South Dakota farm hands and combine jockeys. Similarly, Catherine Keener makes herself completely at home playing Jan, a Winnebago-dwelling itinerant mobile hippie. And she is a comfortable match for Brian Dierker, a first-time actor and the film’s behind-the-scenes white water rapids footage co-coordinator, who plays Jan’s lover, Rainey.

The 22-year-old Mr. Hirsch, who shone as a street-tough skater with a poetic soul in “Lords of Dogtown,” approaches the central role with appropriate earnestness and a courageous physicality. But in late-film scenes alongside Hal Holbrook, as an elderly widower, the young wanderer extols the virtues of new experience in one breath, and discredits human relationships in the next with such lack of persuasion that it’s hard to tell whether Chris is being a pompous and naïve jerk, or Mr. Hirsch has arrived at the limit of his abilities.

The frustrating thing about “Into the Wild” is that in this scene and others, Chris and his immediate family are painted in much broader and more black-and-white strokes than any of the film’s supporting characters. Everyone whom Chris meets on the road to Alaska seems to grow or change in some way under the young man’s borderline messianic influence. Yet early in the film his parents are portrayed as dishonest, emotionally unavailable, manipulative guilt-ridden adulterers, and by the end of the film they are pretty much the same. Granted three dimensions in her early scenes interacting directly with her brother, Carine eventually gets demoted from sister and confidant to narrator by dint of her separation from Chris and by the practical need for a single narrative voice to keep the story events lined up in some coherent order.

This has, I suspect, less to do with the contributions of Mr. Hirsch, Ms. Malone, Ms. Harden, and William Hurt as Chris’s abusive and disapproving father than it has to do with Mr. Penn’s script. Mr. Penn obviously adores Mr. Krakauer’s book. His film visually romances the printed page with such unflagging ardor, fetishistic appreciation, and forensic scrutiny that the words from Chris’s journals, letters, and guide books constantly blaze across the screen like spaceships in a “Star Wars” sequel. Weighed down by a self-indulgent running time that, especially in the latter third of the film, feels like repeated unnecessary trips over ground covered earlier, “Into the Wild” ultimately feels like a well-meaning, sporadically dynamic meander to a foregone conclusion.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use