Into the Wild

Ross Douthat states:

This is an indefensible movie in certain ways, but I enjoyed it anyway. It would have profited from Orwell’s dictum about saints being judged guilty until proven innocent: Sean Penn basically treats Christopher McCandless as the questing would-be holy man he clearly took himself to be, while the other side of the story – about a reckless, charismatic kid who smashed up countless lives while chasing down his bliss, and whose pathetic death was a more-or-less inevitable consequence of his own foolhardiness – slips out involuntarily, between the sweeping landscape shots and Eddie Vedder songs.

And Brian Beutler responds with:

I think this misses quite a bit. At the beginning of the film, we meet a guy who we might well confuse for an idealist and a renegade. But that sense doesn't last long. By mid-movie, when he's had a chance to reflect upon his actions, to meet and ignore the advice of older people who have cast doubt upon his plans and questioned his motives, he seems arrogant and spoiled--on the sort of quest only the son or daughter of rich parents could ever feasibly embark upon. And when it's too late, after we learn about the events in his past that supposedly drove him over the edge, he seems like a deeply confused obsessive. It might be fair to say that, by the end, his character has taken shape by packing on details that make him look less like Thoreau, and more like Don Quixote, or perhaps Ahab, but without the white whale.

I am going to have to lean more towards Ross with this one. It only took a few minutes into the movie for me to remember that I hated the protagonist when I had read the Krakauer book a decade ago. I was in Alaksa near the area where McCandless died a few years afterwards and he was still the laughing stock of the town. That portion of the story was only touched on in the first few minutes of the film and then McCandless was portrayed as quite a sympathetic character.

Nonetheless McCandless was an intriguing character (person). You don't have to like character, or empathize with a character to like a movie. The movie was well worth seeing despite Eddie Veder's voice ringing at all times. The scenery was gorgeous from Alaska, to the desert, to the Grand Canyon. I recommend seeing it on the big screen for that matter, and deal with being torn with thinking McCandless was an idiot and that somehow you still envy him.

Photo by Flickr user Bethany L King used under a Creative Commons license.