Review: call of the wild

Jack London wrote in White Fang: “One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.” It is lesson in self-destruction depressingly played out in the short life of Christopher McCandless - the subject of a new Sean Penn film: Into The Wild.

Sean Penn’s fifth film as director doesn’t disappoint but it also doesn’t excite. Taking on the form of a road movie it follows the troubled McCandless, whose naivety and obsession with wilderness leaves a trial of sadness the length and breadth of America.

It is based on the true story of McCandless, who, as a 22-year-old college graduate disturbed by the fake bliss of his parent’s lives, gave away his entire savings to embark on an anonymous life tramping around America.

From start to finish it is filmed in superb cinematography as McCandless - played sympathetically by Emile Hirsh - walks or hitches from the South Dakotan grain fields, through the alien rock formations of Arizona, to the white wilderness of Alaska.

Into The Wild is also a literary film. Penn applies a Byron poem at the start to underscore the grand American landscapes with powerful prose. And with voiceover narration from both McCandless and his sister (Jena Malone), uses Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Tolstoy and Thoreau to romanticise McCandless naïve dismay at 1990’s American life.

At one point the cheerless subject quotes directly from Thoreau: “Rather than love, than money, than fairness, give me truth.”

Penn, himself, is renown for playing intense, bitter characters and he has done well to bring this out in Hirsh, whose good looks where always in danger of making the self-obsessed McCandless seem too likable.

With the film focusing almost entirely on McCandless, periphery characters are nonetheless memorable and strong -particularly the reformed drunk Ron Franz, played admirably by Hal Holbrook (Deepthroat in All the President’s Men) who tries to adopt McCandless toward the end of the film.

Yet despite the great acting, innovative camera work and realistic dialogue, the film fails. It is long and slow, rarely changing pace or suggesting to viewers an ending of anything other than the predictable.

In perhaps film’s only light point, McCandless finds out he must wait 12 years for permission to paddle down the Colorado River. It is a scene used to underline the hopelessness of leading a life outside the bureaucratic white picket fence norm of 20th century America. But this is a theme we saw decades before in Easy Rider and Penn has nothing more to add.

Overall, Into the Wild has been received well and it should get the recognition it deserves - that of being a beautiful and poetic film - but we should stop short of labelling the film a masterpiece of American introspection.


Film's official site here.