Captain Fantastic (2016)
Directed by Matt Ross
Deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a father devoted to raising his six kids with a rigorous physical and intellectual education is forced to leave his paradise and enter the world, beginning a journey that challenges his idea of what it means to be a parent.
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24 films that influenced Captain Fantastic
What critics say influenced Captain Fantastic
Don’t let the publicity photos of the ensemble cast clad in ’70s-era tuxes and flower-child dresses, or even the cloying Mumford-mimicking soundtrack on the trailer, fool you: Captain Fantastic ain’t some twee, cutesy Wes Anderson romp or a Little Miss Sunshine knockoff.
Captain Fantastic borrows from Little Miss Sunshine in cataloguing the misadventures of a misfit family on a road trip, complete with MacKay as a Paul Dano stand-in.
In places, Captain Fantastic explicitly strains for the same kind of crowd-pleasing indie-quirk as Little Miss Sunshine (another film that opens in an atmosphere of psychological crisis and pivots on a fateful family road trip).
This isn't the behavior of radicals bucking the system; it's the antics of characters contrived to hit the quirky, crowd-pleasing notes that made Little Miss Sunshine a hit with audiences.
Yes, Captain Fantastic is competing for this year’s Little Miss Sunshine prize for heart-warming zaniness.
But despite some obvious points of comparisons with previous Sundance hit Little Miss Sunshine, Captain Fantastic doesn’t fully deliver as either a full-on crowd-pleaser or a critical darling.
In this regard he has more than a little in common with Harrison Ford’s idealistic father in The Mosquito Coast , whose half visionary, half crazed utopian idyll ended in disaster.
Like Allie Fox from The Mosquito Coast—except kinder and gentler—Viggo Mortensen’s Ben fervently believes in his isolationism and parenting approach.
It has echoes of Peter Weir's least heralded movie, 1986's The Mosquito Coast, where Harrison Ford's bull-headed father risks the lives of the children he's trying to protect.
Captain Fantastic is in some ways a less angry, more commercial take on The Mosquito Coast as a man fights against the norm to do what he believes to be best for his family, but while Peter Weir’s film found little warmth for its patriarch Ross’ heart is far bigger.
In a way it reminds of Peter Weir’s underrated The Mosquito Coast , yet there is much more emphasis on comedy of the indie dramedy variety, which works well.
Mortensen gives Ben's authoritarian bent shadings of softness, openness, especially when he encourages his kids to think their thoughts through (forcing his daughter to go deeper in her literary analysis of Lolita is a nice little scene).
But one can also commiserate when he’s hurt by a verbal assault from one of the kids, and respect him when he apologizes to his brother for failing to abide by his house rules, or coaxes an intelligent response to Nabokov’s “Lolita” from one of his daughters who’s decided to jump ahead on her required reading list, or says a fond farewell to a son who’s chosen to leave the nest.
Ben’s daughter analyzing Lolita—“I hate him but I also feel sorry for him, he loves her so much”—seems to address Ben’s questionable parenting, as does a guardianship showdown with his in-laws.
The film opens with a scene reminiscent of John Boorman's "The Emerald Forest."
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All of this is extremely intriguing, calling to mind films like " The Mosquito Coast ," or " Running on Empty ," which had similar cloistered family atmospheres, and charismatic controlling (albeit well-meaning) fathers.
In the tradition of “The Mosquito Coast” and “Running on Empty” (and going back further, “Swiss Family Robinson”), “Captain Fantastic” is all about a family that has gone off the grid in a big way and is now living off the land, isolated from the modern world and all its evil entrapment.
And in plot and approach, Captain Fantastic is a lot like Running on Empty, the 1988 tearjerker about a couple of fugitive revolutionaries who question whether they’ve let down their kids by forcing them into a life they never chose.
As much as it recalls the family road-trip shenanigans of “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Captain Fantastic” may also remind you of “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne ’s drama about a man trying to make peace with his wife as she lies dying.
This odd duck by writer-director Matt Ross plays like a survivalist's remake of The Seven Little Foys (1955), that old Bob Hope movie about a widowed vaudevillian struggling to care for his brood of wacky, free-spirited children.
It's "Swiss Family Robinson," or that 1970s series of films about "The Wilderness Family."
In the tradition of “The Mosquito Coast” and “Running on Empty” (and going back further, “Swiss Family Robinson”), “Captain Fantastic” is all about a family that has gone off the grid in a big way and is now living off the land, isolated from the modern world and all its evil entrapment.
Written and directed by Matt Ross (“28 Hotel Rooms”), the film at times suggests a Disney movie in the “Swiss Family Robinson” mode with enough Oedipal conflicts to fill a five-gallon bucket.
For this cinematic clan, life is something like The Royal Tenenbaums meets Swiss Family Robinson , with traces of The Great Santini mixed in.
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“Captain Fantastic” joins a small canon of films dedicated to American off-the-gridders, from Sean Penn’s masterful “ Into the Wild ” to Rebecca Miller’s “ The Ballad of Jack and Rose ” and Campbell Scott’s “ Off the Map .”
Living with his well-trained kids in mountain-man isolation, he’s a fiercely protective, unreconstructed leftist like Daniel Day-Lewis’s in The Ballad of Jack and Rose.
Like his younger brother Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton, channelling River Phoenix in Stand By Me ), Bo dreams of escaping into the wider world, into the society his parents rejected.