It’s a thin week-end at Cineworld. I’ve seen the good films – ‘Eastern Promises’, ‘Brick Lane’ and ‘Ratatouille’. For the rest, given a choice between three ‘wacky’ brothers bonding on a train journey through India and a trek into Alaska based on a true story, I go for the latter, especially as the critics give it four stars.

In fact, it turns out to be not half bad for what I'd call a 'man's film'. Wasn’t it Philip Larkin who said we all admire someone who kicks over the traces and heads for the horizon? Given our hero’s quoted reading matter, from Thoreau to Kerouac by way of Dostoyevsky, it’s wonder Larkin’s not included. Don’t let your son read the classics, Mrs Worthington, especially if he doubts your integrity and has good reason to leave your bourgeois world in search of ‘truth’.

I’d seen the trailer of ‘Into the Wild’ a few times and put off by the crude image of a rich kid setting fire to a pile of bank notes and heading off in search of adventure. I could never understand all that ‘Swallows and Amazons’ stuff in childhood, and although I was happy enough to go to the Shackleton exhibition at the Maritime Museum, I wouldn’t want to face the Yukon winter in a derelict bus.

There are some wince-inducing clichés in the self-styled Alexander Supertramp’s pilgrimage, including a prolonged stay with a pair of middle-aged hippies, a caricature couple of liberated Danes and a grizzled recluse who wants to adopt him; one more tearful parting and I might have sought the wilds of Haymarket. Having said that, the director’s choice of narrative form is excellent, combining voice-over narration by the protagonist’s sister recording family reactions to the young man’s disappearance shortly after graduation, (a moving performance from Willam Hurt as the father) a series of contrasting flashbacks and some superbly scary episodes in the wilderness. Add the immensity of the Alaskan landscape through changing seasons, so big it appears in split-screen format at one point, and it adds up to a compellingly watchable film. The protagonist, engagingly portrayed by Emile Hirsch, is extremely likeable, partly because he prepares so thoroughly for his doomed venture and partly because he adopts a non-judgemental towards the sad strangers he encounters. Like Ophelia, I loved him for the hardships he endured. A well-chosen soundtrack of ‘roadie’ songs and a very moving ending make me glad I didn’t choose the road to Darjeeling after all.




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Desdemona, not Ophelia

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I was paraphrasing Othello's lines: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.'

A positive review, then, Cornelia. I think I may go and see it after all - I read a couple of reviews in the papers which were pretty damning, mainly because of the 'spin' put on the story by Sean Penn, who had changed a few of the facts to fit his idea of the main character's motivations - especially his relationship with his parents. They seemed to think it was a pretty selfish thing for the mc to do to his family. But such is life, I guess.

- NaomiM

Naomi, thanks for such a quick response.

Yes, I decided to ignore all that and take the film on its merits. It's made clear at the end that the film is based on real events but I think it's a mistake to argue about the distortions. In the film the protagonist keeps a detailed diary which give the events credibility. Besides, it's clear from his sister's narrative that his decisions reflected an inherent wanderlust, not just reaction to his parents. They would have come after him if he'd left a trail. The contant quoting of 'escape' literature, as well as the glimpses of alternative lifestyles(the weakest aspect of the film, in my view) and commentary supplied by the songs attempts to add a dimension beyond a simple family-dispute scenario. That said, the pressures on him to conform to the parental mould are made clear, as is the guilt mixed with rejection.

The wild-life photography was a bit too National Geographic at times,especially the slow-motion effects, but I liked the survival-lore details and the irony of how,combined with a Spring thaw,a handbook finally let the hero down. I'm not a great Discovery Channel fan myself, but I can see this might appeal to people who are. It's also ambiguous and complex enough to make a satisfying film.

Sheila

Everything hangs on the motivation in this story. I didn't see the review that pointed out the changes Penn made. The critical one on which the whole judegment of the movie depends for me is one of the final entries in his journal - that for all his travels he finally came to realise that experience is more precious if it is shared.

If he did write this then the film is tragic in a different way for an intelligent vital young man in reaction to his emotionally dysfunctional family can only discover a profound but everyday fact of human life at the point a death brought about by his own flight from intimacy and human contact.

If as I suspect Penn put this in then he should never be allowed near a true life story again for IF he did put this in he sentimentalised the tragedy of a young man who NEVER discovered how to connect with other human beings and fled such intimacy to the point of death.

I was in tears at the end - but they were tears at the sheer WASTE of a vital life despite the courage, the fortitude, the indpendence etc etc - that just makes it worse.

Sometimes the ACTUAL truth of a piece can be transcended by the ARTISTIC truth the director puts across. Here the artistic 'truth' is to sentimentalise the waste of a young life. That for me is unforgiveable - however much money the film makes.

Z

Yes, I agree, and the final entry in the diary -it seemed to be written between printed lines in the plant manual- carries the greatest weight. Yet he had said with great conviction before that it was a mistake to think the greatest happiness lay in human relationships. What a paradox - happiness in being alone in the wild, but only validated by sharing with a (necessarily) absent other.

To my mind, his parents did what seemed expedient before he was born (telling lies) and cared for him as best they knew how, given a troubled relationship. I think the old man on Salvation Mountain was relevant here, when he said that to forgive is to love. Many families can be regarded as dysfunctional, but it was Christopher's misfortune that his life was cut short - he never acquired the wisdom to forgive his parents. The revelation of the fahter's final suffering underlined this, I think. (Great performance from William Hurt)

For me the film didn't sentimenatlise but dramatised opposing human impulses, underlined by the literary references and the songs - the desire to be free versus the desire for intimacy. Most of us opt for the latter, but this film helps us to understand why some people make the former choice.

Sheila