Making 'Into the Wild' even wilder

Sean Penn strips away the book's moral ambivalence and aims for the white water

BRIAN D. JOHNSON | October 1, 2007 |

In the spring of 1992, a 24-year-old dreamer named Christopher McCandless hitchhiked to Alaska, north of Mt. McKinley, and walked alone into the wilderness to live off the land. His decomposed body was discovered in an abandoned bus four months later. The young man's death marked the end of an odyssey that began two years earlier when McCandless, after graduating with honours from Atlanta's Emory University, slammed the door on a life of privilege. He donated his entire $25,000 in savings to Oxfam, drove west, then abandoned his car in the Mojave Desert, burned his money and rechristened himself Alexander Supertramp. Now he may have finally achieved the transcendence he was looking for. Portrayed with irresistible charisma by Emile Hirsch, McCandless has found a mythic afterlife onscreen -- in Sean Penn's Into the Wild, a movie based on Jon Krakauer's 1996 bestseller.

Readers like to complain that movies are inevitably weaker than the books that inspire them. Here, that's not the case. While remaining basically faithful to the book, and to most of the known facts about McCandless, Into the Wild delivers an altogether different, and far more enthralling, experience.

There has been much debate about McCandless. Was he an explorer on a spiritual quest, or a careless thrill-seeker who squandered his life? Alaskan locals tend to dismiss him as another blundering, ill-equipped tourist who painted himself into a fatal corner. Weighing the evidence in his book, Krakauer mounts an investigation that concludes McCandless was a visionary who was a victim of misadventure.

The movie dispenses with the argument entirely and embraces its tragic hero -- a fresh-faced devotee of Thoreau who tries to make the world his Walden Pond -- with unconditional love. In the book, we view him from a remove, through the eyes of an author who is reminded of his own daredevil exploits as a young mountaineer inflamed with Nietzsche and Kerouac. Onscreen, it's simpler: all you see is the actor, and Hirsch is such an attractive, generous presence you want to wrap him up and take him home. On the road, that's the effect he has on everyone he meets -- from a weathered hippie(Catherine Keener)who aches with motherly concern, to an old recluse(Hal Holbrook)whose paternal instincts are rekindled 45 years after he lost his wife and son to a drunk driver.

Though framed with idealism, McCandless's quest is fuelled by an angry rebellion against his own family, which he saw as a nest of hypocrisy. In his teens, he discovered his father had led a double life with his ex-wife, fathering a son with her two years after Chris was born. Considering that Penn spent a decade courting Chris's parents for the rights to their son's story, it's remarkable that the film's portrayal of them(by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden)is so unvarnished.

McCandless's heroism, however, is enhanced by some strategic tweaks and omissions in Penn's script. In real life, McCandless took an aluminum canoe down a calm lower stretch of the Colorado River; in the film, he paddles a kayak through a monstrous set of rapids in the Grand Canyon. The scene serves as a pivotal rite of passage, and with Hirsch doing his own whitewater stunts, as a trial for the actor as much as the character. The movie also neglects to mention that McCandless entered the Alaskan bush without a map -- which would have revealed an easy escape route across a river that had him trapped and dying of starvation.

Despite these flashes of poetic licence, the movie feels vividly authentic. Shooting on location with documentary realism, Penn traces his hero's footsteps through stunning landscapes from Mexico to Alaska. The result is a great American road movie, an epic of idealism colliding with visceral reality -- all too literally when McCandless kills a moose, then is horrified when, in a riot of blood and flies, he can't stop the meat from rotting.

Penn's movie ultimately redeems a tragic quest. As McCandless blazed his Huck Finn trail up and down America, devouring Jack London, Thoreau and Tolstoy, he was carving his own voracious narrative into the land. With the movie, that narrative is made flesh. Chris becomes a Christ figure, an environmental martyr. While his death was an accident(explained in a twist that should not be spoiled), he was author of his own destiny. And on film his story achieves the literary grandeur of the writing that inspired him.

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