Into the Wild (2007)
Directed by Sean Penn
After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity, and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness.
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In this regard, compare the film with Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), the documentary about self-styled grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by the very animals he sought to protect.
The audacity of a commitment that contains such a high potential for death brings to mind the story of Timothy Treadwell ( "Grizzly Man," a Werner Herzog documentary), another adventurer who engaged in a dangerous enterprise in a remote location.
Werner Herzog’s “ Grizzly Man ” documents the life and death of another soul who sought spiritual purity in an environment that was drawn more from Hobbes than Thoreau.
Consider Timothy Treadwell, whose video diary of life among the Alaskan grizzlies was chronicled in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man.
I couldn't help but think of another film about an idealist who got in trouble from romanticising the Alaskan wilderness, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man , but while that film was almost comically happy to indict the protagonist's idiocy, Penn clearly expects us to regard McCandless's fate as a beautiful tragedy.
Both the cruel beauty of the film and this quality of its main character call to mind Werner Herzog’s similar, and similarly brilliant, documentary “Grizzly Man,” about Timothy Treadwell, a nature lover who lived among the bears in Alaska and treated them as big fluffy pets, until they ate him.
Many patches of Into the Wild brought to mind Come and See, a 1985 WWII film from Russia directed by Elem Klimov and lavishly praised by Penn, about a Bellarussan teen caught up in some of the unspeakable horrors of that war.
It's a New Deal kind of film, with more than a hint of John Ford's 1940 masterpiece, The Grapes Of Wrath.
It’s perhaps the most superfluous movie music since Carly Simon underlined and italicized every other scene in Nora Ephron’s “This is My Life.”
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On the other hand, the film is impossibly gorgeous, as shot by Eric Gautier, who has made a career out of gorgeous movies that are kind of bad in all other ways (his last project to make much impact in this country was the pancake-flat Che biopic The Motorcycle Diaries ).
The "getting of wisdom" allows for an ample variety of landscapes, and, if Penn's eye for beauty is mostly trite (cathedral lighting ladled on tree trunks, golden sunsets seen out of a boxcar), a good deal of imagery is splashing-the-lens visceral, caught by the splendid cinematographer Eric Gautier with the offhand glow he lent The Motorcycle Diaries .
Cinematographer Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Clean, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) favors long lenses here, the kind that can isolate one subject twixt foreground and background and then, dramatically changing their plane of focus, seek out another.
Enhanced by the storytelling of Jon Krakauer and now Sean Penn, the countercultural tale of Into the Wild has some of the same poetry to it as On the Road or The Motorcycle Diaries.
The camerawork is skillfully designed and executed by cinematographer Eric Gautier ( "The Motorcycle Diaries" who takes advantage of the beauty and off beat off-the-beaten-path nature of the locales.
Hirsch may now be where Leonardo DiCaprio was around the time of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "The Basketball Diaries."
Penn's film poses a little bit of everything in the grand tradition of films like "Five Easy Pieces," and "Harry and Tonto," in which our main character is simply another pariah in a life they simply can't belong to.
Penn's film poses a little bit of everything in the grand tradition of films like "Five Easy Pieces," and "Harry and Tonto," in which our main character is simply another pariah in a life they simply can't belong to.
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This is a plot for Herzog, but Herzog already magnificently desiccated man's search for Eden for smugness, lunacy and dark rapture in Grizzly Man , and Gus Van Sant already envisioned the wanderer's yearning for cosmic evaporation in Gerry.
Penn’s style of directing seems to revert back to the ’70s, and just like Robert Redford’s “Jeremiah Johnson” there are some beautiful landscapes captured.