Movies that don't suck: Into the Wild

What do you do at night in South Carolina when it's too cold to go skinnydipping on the beach? If your hotel room is equipped with a DVD player, you go across Route 17 to the Piggly-Wiggly where you rent Into the Wild and stay up till midnight getting your eyes knocked out by Sean Penn's mind-boggling imagistic adaptation of the life and death of Christopher McCandless.

I read John Krackauer's Into the Wild a few years ago and it stuck with me like a kiss from a stranger. I spent the first year of my life in a small fishing village in Alaska and have been back several times with my father on camping trips, being flown into remote lakes and islands by bush pilots who would come back a week later to pick us up. There were no cell phones back then, and if there were, it's doubtful they would have worked -- the sense of isolation was thrilling, especially to a twelve year old, the excitement always with an undercurrent of potential danger. One of my strongest memories is salmon fishing with my dad in a river, getting my line snagged and yanking it loose. The hook flew back and caught my father in the face, an inch below his eye. I remember him telling me afterward that if it had caught him in the eye, no one would have been able to come and get us to a hospital for days. We were at the mercy of a vast and beautiful wilderness whose punishing indifference to us was absolute.

Into the Wild comes at your eyes with that same elemental energy and sense of peril. The movie does a phenomenal job capturing that sense of gorgeous emptiness and the way it can turn without warning and sink its teeth into the throat of youthful naivete. Penn structures the journey of 22-year-old McCandless so that his final months aboard an abandoned bus in the middle of the wilderness are intercut with vivid encouters along the road, with people who look at him and see what's been missing from their own lives. As played by Emile Hirsch, McCandless is the charming young kid that everybody wants to have stick around, but is always just making a few weeks' pay to fund his "great Alaskan adventure," while back east, his dysfunctional family and sympathetic but increasingly distressed sister hire P.I.'s to track him down.

Meanwhile McCandless heads westward with a backpack full of Jack London paperbacks and espouses his own home-cooked ideal of a splendid isolation, his response to a corrupt and shameful society. Because he's so determined, he achieves exactly what he sets out to do by going beyond previous frame of reference and forging a new identity for himself north of everything. Ultimately, his story becomes tragic in the classic sense of the word because by the time he realizes the flaw in his own logic, he's already signed his own death warrant.

The difference between Into the Wild and a documentary like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man is that, by dramatizing the story, Sean Penn actually makes what happens to Chris McCandless seem more real and sympathetic than reality. Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell lived and died among deadly predators because his mindset was a lethal combination of ignorance and daft-headed arrogance: up to the very end, he thought of himself as one with nature, in a place where he had no earthly business. When the bear finally ate him, you felt nothing but the nearly audible click of the universe putting itself back in order. Chris McCandless, on the other hand--or at least Sean Penn's version of him--never seems to lose the fear and awe of the wilderness that surrounds him and in the end, he does grasp his true place in the world of people. Except that it's too late.

Into the Wild was a great book that could have been easily messed up at the hands of a bad director. Sean Penn does everything right here, and he's made the best film of his career. The cast is terrific, the scenery is stunning and Eddie Vedder's music fits in perfectly with the fear and awe of a young man falling sway to a urge that, on some level, he understands must ultimately destroy him. In every way that matters, Into the Wild does not suck.