The Long Goodbye

[October 3rd, 2007]

There are all kinds of movies that could be made from Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild , which recounts the short life of Christopher McCandless—a young man who left everyone he knew to live off the Alaskan wilderness, and wound up dying of starvation in an abandoned bus. Sean Penn has directed two of these possible movies and crammed them together, letting them jostle for position for more than two hours. One of the movies attempts to understand McCandless’ reasons for doing what he did; the other film just wants to know what it felt like. The answers to the second question are a lot more interesting than anything that emerges from the first. When you find yourself futilely trying to cook a moose in the shadow of Mount Denali, the “why” starts to seem a whole lot less important.

Which doesn’t stop Penn from asking. Into the Wild is bogged down by a load of dime-store psychoanalysis, much of it provided in voice-over by Jena Malone in the role of McCandless’ sister, who ponders Chris’ unhappy childhood, his obsessive wanderlust and the lessons he was trying to teach in his journey. There’s also a good bit of tripe about Chris as Christ—“You’re not Jesus, are you?” asks a fellow traveler, only half joking—or at least as some kind of modern Thoreau, inspiring us to simplify. I’m all for simplicity, but I’m going to venture that failing to take an adequate food supply into Alaska is not an example to celebrate.

But counterposed against these ponderous and silly elements is another approach. Into the Wild traverses the same route McCandless hitchhiked, and Penn follows the exuberant actor Emile Hirsch as he bounces up the California and Oregon coastline, detours east into Dakotan wheat fields, and camps out for a long while along the Salton Sea. These adventures have an improvised, loose-limbed quality: Hirsch, who looks like a less self-involved Leonardo DiCaprio, carries on conversations with an apple core, explores landscapes with palpable enthusiasm, and even openly mugs for the camera. Hirsch’s interactions with other actors have a similar freedom, but the encounters are tinged with an increasing melancholy: Every time he makes a new friend, it’s another person he’s going to leave behind forever. “You look like a loved kid,” observes Catherine Keener’s hippie mama when she first meets Chris. If he isn’t a loved kid at the movie’s beginning, he is by the end: Countless people become his surrogate family, only to watch him recede down the road.

Into the Wild is infuriating, self-important, bewitching and poignant—which is appropriate, since McCandless was all of those things as well. But the movie possesses one quality that its hero apparently lacked: It understands the feelings of people not named Christopher McCandless. Most of all, it recognizes how the youngster’s journey ripped a hole into the people he met; each person who hoped to adopt him was met with an extended goodbye. “Just get your pack and get out of here, OK?” Keener weeps as she sees the boy off. “I don’t think I could take a hug.” Sean Penn’s movie is a farewell embrace of McCandless, and at its best it’s an agonizing hug to take.