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The biographical tale of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) starts off on the road to possible film greatness. Originally, the man who would become Alexander Supertramp (the moniker he adopts whilst finding himself at one with nature so to speak in the American wilderness) is a Harvard-bound star student who donates $24,000 of his college fund to Oxfam and then somehow decides to venture from his middle-class Virginian home into the wild. Director Penn illustrates this early segment of the film perfectly, utilising the excellent melodies of Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder to fully harmonize the sensational natural beauty of the United States and the protagonist's free spirit. From reading background information on the real-life McCandless, who incidentally lived from 1968-1992, he was seemingly a well-educated chap with an innate affection for extravagant liberty who mixed the autonomy and self-sufficient lifestyle of the 70s with an inherent shrewdness of urban and desolate existence to survive in the 80s and 90s.
Hirsch has certainly matured from his Girl Next Door days and the Californian pulls off the unaccompanied-in-the-rough-country role that Tom Hanks similarly played in Cast Away with magnificent composure. The central character apparently used to be the captain of his high school cross-country team and he encouraged his team-mates to treat running as a spiritual exercise in which they were "running against the forces of darkness� all the evil in the world, all the hatred." Consequently, as the marathon running time plays out, one believes that Hirsch has the intense idealism and physical stamina required to validly portray the real McCandless simply by his range of emotions and primal prowess. On his many travels within the Land of the Free, Supertramp, our hero's signature tag he dreams up without any type of formal identification left, meets Vince Vaughn's South Dakotan farmer, two Danish lovebirds, Catherine Keener and Brian Dieker's mellow hippies, and Hal Holbrook's affable pensioner to name just a few. These jovial folks accommodate, feed and actually educate Supertramp before stepping aside for him to move closer to living his wilderness dream in Alaska.
Sean Penn captures the radiant destinations in a very experimental manner, echoing Terrence Malick's version of nature and incorporating many close-ups of trivial things like exhaust pipes when an engine is shutting down. The director sticks relatively close to Jon Krakauer's bestseller of the same name and overall, he commits a respectable story to celluloid of a stray escaping society to live in a Thoreau-like world of solitary contemplation. Unfortunately the major flaw of the film is the length. Penn fuses enough realism into proceedings - railway violence, slaughtering animals and even sensible hair growth - but these just add to the already epic feature time.
The summary
Penn's true story of Christopher McCandless and Emile Hirsch's portrayal of the exaggerated wanderer will not be forgotten in a hurry. Regrettably, Into the Wild has the ingredients of an all-time classic but it simply doesn't quite deliver, notwithstanding a stunning America replicating a paradisiacal Eden.
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