Movie Review: Into The Wild

The Hitcher probably did as much to dramatize or sensationalize the dangers of hitchhiking, so it's to Sean Penn's credit that Into The Wild doesn't try to amp up the tension of travelling as hitchhiker, harkening back to a time when people weren't so scared to pick up hitchhikers.

Into The Wild is the story of Chris McCandless, who gave up what savings he had, and wandered the West, with a desire to head to Alaska, leaving his parents and sister behind. Given his general lack of money, hitchhiking seemed his primary mode of transportation. There's no scary guy trying to kill, nor someone wanting to swap sex for favors.

Instead, there are bits and pieces of the people McCandless meets in his journal.

Part of the intrigue of what he did, to me, is when he did. McCandless was born a few months before I was, graduated the same year I did. Between the year I graduate college and the year my brother graduated college, Chris had wandered the West Coast, deliberately cut off from his family, eventually making it to Alaska, meeting various folks along the way, most of them quite friendly.

One obvious question: why? The question is perhaps as old as man, especially once man could stop worrying about how to feed himself and stay alive, which is, what is the meaning of life. The Matrix, in its way, asks these questions (btw, the kind of stylistic flourishes that the Wachowski brothers were so noted for seem far more obvious in the original Matrix film, but not so much in the sequels--perhaps the style began to grate on them, which is why they used it less in subsequent sequels).

In The Matrix, intrepid hero, Thomas Anderson has a hidden hacker personality, Neo. Eventually, he discovers his daily life, as a programmer, is a fraud. This is, for a brief time, a revelation.

In a more mundane, but more realistic way, Chris McCandless wants to escape the constraints of society to find a truer way to live, out in the wild, without money, much like Thoreau (who apparently, didn't quite abandon society). This escape is perhaps as much rebellion from his parents, who, it turns out, had the two children (Chris and his sister) out of wedlock, while the father was still married to his first wife.

The film isn't terribly plot driven. It shows as much as Chris wanted to live on his own and as much as he felt he didn't need relations with other folks, that indeed, he did make friends, and had to take jobs here and there, to survive. But all that is somewhat beside the point.

The point is to give up all you know, and head out into the wild. In this, there are echoes of several other men. In particular, there's Timothy Treadwell (of Grizzly Man) who, several months a year, would live in the wilderness with the bears, only to be mauled (perhaps as a minor tribute, a bear shows up near the end). It also reminds me a little of Touching The Void, about mountain climbers, who, for a week or so at a time, head out by themselves or in a small group to a mountain, and try to conquer nature.

This is a challenging film to make. Was Chris so idealistic? Did he not rail against his parents? I find I don't particularly understand Chris, even if he touches something in most of us who want to escape what society has put on us. "Society, society, society!" which asks us to take jobs, which asks us to make money, which asks us to buy stuff, which asks us to raise kids. Who among us haven't thought it might be cool to give that all away, only to be yanked by the reality that they'd rather be rich, having all their needs taken care of, then to live a spare life, contributing "nothing" to society.

In the end, it's hard to say whether Chris regretted what he did. Perhaps he might have been a bit more educated about how he went out into the wild, and would have figured out how to get back to society, the one he shunned so much. Penn's film idealizes his trip, deciding that even in grips of death, it was worth it to do what he did (of course, Penn made a movie about this, so he surely had some sympathy for such a guy).

The film does make one wonder about Chris's relationships. He makes good friends, but he never quite gets a girlfriend, nor does he seem to long for such relationships. Even Timothy Treadwell, who spent months along, had several girlfriends. Did the unhealthy relationship of his parents make him not want to get into a serious relationship? Indeed, there's also hints that his sister and he had a really close relationship, though not quite sexual, but perhaps the closest he had of anyone he knew, and even then, as she points out (in, ugh, voiceover), he never contacted her, never contacted the family.

This kind of abandonment of society always seems far more romantic than the equally improbable dedication of a person to want to be successful in a society. The desire of the latter seems impure, requiring a knowledge of business, and a personality of persistence that many of us not only lack, but find rather distasteful.

The film runs very long, and despite its sprawling nature, feels rather small and intimate, because McCandless only ever relates to one or two people at a time. One interesting point is how the movie emphasizes his embrace of his own name, where he had adopted the moniker Alex Supertramp (and the rather ridiculous belt loop to indicate how much food he was eating).

All in all, a movie that's perhaps more interesting in what it makes you think about, then what it is actually.