Into the Wild

At least a year has passed since I last considered Into the Wild from any perspective other than the obvious one of grief and envy. I think it's time I find a more articulate apology for this messy bit of memory.

First, the movie has all sorts of structural and formal problems. On the most basic narrative level, McCandless's sister, Carine, the invisible storyteller, seems, functionally, half-necessary and half-disposable, more of a plot convenience than an organic logical or emotional tool. Sean Penn wants to have it both ways: not to distract his audience from the vital, visceral spectacle of Emile Hirsch tramping toward legend and annihilation, and not to trust that spectacle to carry the contextual depth required for us to appreciate McCandless's regrettable, admirable creeds and contradictions.

Worse, this flaw reveals a more treacherous difficulty. Drawing a bit too much on Krakauer's speculations, Penn overplays the family conflicts to explain McCandless's (admittedly) unknowable reasons for transforming himself into nobody. But the central, psychological angle doesn't make McCandless any more concrete or sympathetic; it just ruins an otherwise wonderfully clean and caring effort with maudlin cant. We don't know why McCandless was who he was. That mystery makes him more complex and human than any half-baked portrait of the broken home can--take a note, James Merrill--and Penn should have had the good taste to leave well enough alone.

Finally, while the movie is long, it should have been longer. Penn hurries too many delicate scenes, blends events that should remain separate and discrete, and altogether cuts episodes from the book that not only translate well to the screen but contribute directly and forcefully to the story. My instincts tell me that an audience already invested in the two-and-a-half hour account of McCandless's doomed naturalism can sit still for another forty minutes as the subtler rewards of its brilliant, hard, uncorrupted, hurtful spirit unfold.

Now, for the virtues. Emile Hirsch is stunning, playing both sides of Krakauer's McCandless--the heartbreaking, broken idealist and the self-invented egoist and cynic--to perfection. Hal Holbrook--who is Mark Twain, by the way--also is magnificent. Every role is memorably acted, deeply felt, roundly crafted, and true to the facts. Moreover, Penn's gamble to cast actual, living witnesses in key roles rather than professional actors pays off. This is, after all, a story about people, and, more than that, of a single person. Penn understands this, and, veteran that he is, he places very real people at the heart of his project.

Better, though, is the curious magic Penn orchestrates between places--he tracks McCandless step for step in reverse order, from Alaska to Georgia, shooting on-location throughout--and the score he commissioned from Eddie Vedder. Together, the physical presence of the place, the very environments McCandless walked and worked and perished in, and the ethereal, longing absence of the music forge a deeply persuasive bond between the hero's own twin failings: desire for emptiness and desire for closeness. It's impossible to watch this movie and not to feel vicariously both those desires surging through your body, compelling you to leave everything else, as he did, to burn, and to recover its ashes in your blood and heart, healing all that you've destroyed.

And finally, the frame device, as old as the chanson de geste and its big gay brother, the dream vision. Into the Wild uses a simple, unoriginal framing style, and it uses it effectively. It is entirely appropriate that we arrive at the final act knowing already what its achievement has cost, and that we feel in every step toward that final point the unalterable law that lends his footfall such a light and luminous sadness. Penn wants us to feel both forward and backward; the interlocking episodes form a chamber where each stir becomes an echo and a premonition. We need to grieve both for what waits ahead and for what rests behind, for the memory and for the anticipation, for the mistakes we've made and for the furious lies that we live and fulfill.

Chris McCandless, I think we can all agree, kept a lonely genius, and a strange heart, and a deadly conscience. We can also agree that, whatever he set out to accomplish, he failed, and that in the process he ruined more lives than his just his own. He contradicted nearly every value he believed in. He was a kid. Nevertheless, his failure eclipses any success I've ever experienced, or seen, or heard about, or imagined. He had the courage and fidelity and common, artless wonder to take the manufactured tales of his heroes--Tolstoy, London, Thoreau--and live them, as though they had never been anything so bourgeois as literature. That really is heroic. Taking life seriously is heroic, and, in this case, tragic.

The movie acknowledges this dear consequence and represents it as best it can. Its director makes more than a few bad choices; most are guileless and awkward in exactly the way McCandless himself could be. Individual scenes swerve into the saccharine or mawkish; certain lines and angles and images are unfortunate; Penn incapably handles a few tortuously complex or difficult subjects, treating them as obscurities to be clarified rather than as mysteries to behold. But despite these considerable flaws, the movie shows what it means to show, teaches what it learns, and celebrates what it loves. Into the Wild is not argument; it is an elegy. Were it an argument, its flaws would be more meaningful. As an elegy, it tells a story, and the story is what matters. Ceremony is the public space in which we practice our values in order to confirm them. It's where we sing our collective or individual pasts, where we live our histories and decide what we love and what we wish to remember. Whatever is wrong with this movie, which is plenty, every time I watch it, I remember more, love more, value more. I have a stronger story to tell. I only hope that, one day, I too can lay my life at the terrible place where friends gather to praise or blame my own particular failure. A-

Slothrop: Your appraisal is so stupendously correct it was read aloud in lieu of a bedtime story. How come you can't say exuberantly wise things like this all the time, gorilla?

Koko: Gorilla talk pretty.