An image of a handsome young man is seen displayed on a bedside table in the middle of the night. A disembodied voice on the soundtrack, then the startled gasp of a mother waking from a nightmare, wondering where her son is, whether he is safe, and what his motives were for severing all contact with the world he knew. The young man is Christopher McCandless, a high-scoring graduate who decided to live the life of a great American wanderer, beholden to no-one and no-thing, and while what follows celebrates such idealistic liberty, this opening scene of Sean Penn’s dramatisation of these true events in the early nineties suggest the keen awareness the film has of the collateral cost of self-ostracism. This awareness seems to evade Chris himself, as he abandons his car one day and never returns to the life he knew, instead grabbing odd-jobs for a few weeks to earn enough money to pay for supplies and gear to keep him moving through Arizona, Mexico, and eventually Alaska. His abandoned sister states that the reason Chris has not sent her any letters is because he knew she trusted him enough and loved him enough not to need them. A romantic notion, but perhaps also a deluded one.
Chris is seen initially making camp in a deserted bus in the Alaskan wilderness, subsequent overlapping, dreamlike, and subjectively fractured sequences revealing his cutting-loose, his journeys, his encounters, and the growing realisation and pain brewing at his erstwhile family home. As the unpleasant domestic environment in the latter is sketched through Terrence Malick-esque voiceovers it becomes easier to see Chris’ quest as a simple attempt to escape the society that he sees represented by his abusive father and his brittle and cold mother. That he then spends much of his trip searching out surrogate father figures – all of whom live outside societal restrictions – is a bittersweet irony. It is not, however, highlighted in the film, but a motif left to drift unobtrusively through it, like a dust caught in afternoon sun.
Penn, directing for the fourth time, again chooses a story about individuals who cannot be understood, and whose own stated motives are merely proxy to a wealth of inner turmoil and yearning which cannot be expressed in words or narrative. Marrying the visual elegiasm of Badlands with an attraction to the obsessive, self-deceptive, and pining characters of Werner Herzog, Penn makes films which are above all a celebration of the existence of life and spirit in the face of overwhelming scepticism and random unpleasantness. Into The Wild only touches on the anguished mania that is seen in The Pledge and The Crossing Guard, but this state-of-nervousness remains a necessary corollary of any attempt to influence a world which, thanks to its absurdity, can only ever be mapped on the level of the subconscious. The growing confusion and loss of William Hurt’s paterfamilias certainly belongs in the same warped AA meeting as Jack Nicholson’s distant loners.
While one would never expect the film to be rushed, at two-and-a-half hours the story begins to weary, as McCandless continues to (eventually) reject potentially corrective adult role models, and slowly makes his way to an environment which has no trucks to hitch rides on, or helpful hippies to cook him dinner. Alaska might be seen by some as the nadir of McCandless’ intent, but it seems to show an extreme to which even he should not quite be willing to go. It is telling that he chooses to camp in the only indication of humanity for miles around. His subsequent difficulties are the most compelling of moments of the film, and for all the implicit and explicit support and vindication of Chris’ actions throughout, the dangers begin to seep in.
Incredibly well made, the film draws typically genuine and quintessentially American performances from its high-calibre cast, Emile Hirsh not only resembling McCandless but capturing his peculiarly charismatic vacancy. The music, while frequently beautiful, unfortunately serves occasionally to undermine the drama and the quietly breathtaking landscape cinematography – one sequence of Chris climbing a snow-drift, the sound of his shoes crunching on the earth and the clean air rustling through the trees achieves in a few seconds what a dozen specially-written songs attempt throughout.
In Friedrich Dürenmatt’s original novel of The Pledge the motivations of the detective in befriending the single mother and her pretty daughter are never in question: he is to use them as bait to catch a killer, and we hate him for it. Just as Penn muddied these simple waters in his earlier film, here he keeps the exact reasons for Chris’ movements indefinite, forcing us to consider his actions, and those of his parents, as motivated by the immense and invisible forces of environment and psychology, rather than a writer’s need for structure, consequence, and moral arithmetic.
No comments:
Post a Comment