Aloha, Subtlety
We wanted to like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, but he had to literally fill its screen with one word: “alone”
image courtesy of Paramount Vantage
By Shawn Wines Sean Penn doesn’t trust us. In fairness, his three previous directorial efforts combined didn’t come close to Spicoli’s only effort at the box office, so maybe he shouldn’t. But for a film where the primary theme is loneliness, Into the Wild is frustratingly reluctant to let us experience it. Penn’s film has a confidence and an audacious visual style rarely attempted by actors-turned-directors, even great ones like Clint Eastwood and Sydney Pollack. Into the Wild comes equipped with not only the strong performances one might expect given Penn’s day job, but also a sprawling narrative that most of today’s directors simply couldn’t pull off. Penn wrote the script as well, adapting from Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book. In 1990, 22-year-old Chris McCandless graduated from Emory, gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car, and set out for Alaska. After two years of hitchhiking, kayaking, and train hopping, he got there. The film introduces us to him as he finds an abandoned bus in the wilderness, then proceeds to flash back to moments from his life and journey. It’s a beautiful film, both in pure naturalistic visuals and the spirit behind it. Emile Hirsch proves he’s for real, and although he doesn’t disappear completely into his role like Leonardo DiCaprio has begun to, he’s better in this than DiCaprio was in anything before The Aviator. Late in the film when we’re watching McCandless starve his face is brutally pale and gaunt, with a fixed look of desperation more terrifying than anything the horror world has cooked up in years. Marcia Gay Harden gives the film’s best supporting performance as McCandless’s mother, taking the distraught housewife cliché into untested waters. William Hurt as her husband and Jena Malone as her daughter both feel underused. Malone serves mainly as the film’s narrator, one of many devices Penn utilizes as a crutch for a film that was walking fine on its own. The worst crutch, however, is Penn’s apparent desire to make writing a focal point. The film opens with a postcard from McCandless to a former employer that he writes out in yellow cursive over images of Alaska. If there’s anything worse than hearing a character read a postcard in a voiceover, it’s watching tone-building nature photography being scribbled over. The film is then broken into chapters with title cards popping up every 20 or 30 minutes, and which do nothing to help the viewer but probably made Penn feel more faithful to the book and more organized as a screenwriter. Penn’s frequent reliance on showing journal entries and carvings is ridiculous. After one montage that effectively shows McCandless’s isolation, Penn cuts to a close-up on a word from a passage carved earlier into a tree. The word, 40 feet high, is “ALONE.” Ridiculous, right? In another crucial scene late in the film, we see McCandless writing “lonely” and “scared” in his journal, as if Penn didn’t trust Hirsch’s great performance and his own vibrant cinematography to get these emotions across. If we want to read what characters are thinking, we read books. If we want to watch them think, we watch movies. In one of the film’s opening scenes, we see McCandless lining up a caribou in the sight of his rifle and then letting it live when a baby caribou strolls up behind it. It plays like a Bambi-fied studio exec’s mandatory note on making the lead likeable, but Penn almost saves it in the end by having McCandless kill a moose out of desperation, showing how far he’s come. The scene is bloody and brutal, as he races against the flies and maggots to secure an edible chunk of meat. After these minutes of primal struggling end in heartbreaking failure, McCandless washes the blood off his hands (note: no cut to a close-up of a “SYMBOLISM” carved in a moose) and jots something in his notepad to the effect of, “I wish I hadn’t shot that moose.” It’s like every time the film’s uses up the space on a small subtlety chalkboard, Penn wipes a giant hackneyed eraser across it then slaps you in the face with it on the way out. And then Michael Douglas wrote to his boss in Fatal Attraction, “I wish I hadn’t fucked that crazy bitch.”
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