« Low And Behold Wins At Sidewalk | Main | Small Town Docs »

October 3, 2007

Into The Wild

Thoughts:

• The film is troubled by an inconsistent narrator. It begins with McCandless reciting his mantra, and then continues, sporadically, with musings from his sister (his real sister, and not Jena Malone, who plays her onscreen - a coup on Penn's part), while generally ignoring the one voice that should be most predominant, whose name is cited in the title. The land never becomes a character the way I wish it could have been. The scenery is picturesque, but it rarely is given time to breath.

• As a typographic stickler, I have to mention that the opening titles feel like weak imitations of really amazing opening titles. I think it's because they're supposed to look old fashioned, but they don't have that optically printed grit to them.

• There's a moment early on where McCandless is eating an apple. It's a series of quick cuts - a sign of extended improvisation pared down to its best moments - and it ends with McCandless (or, rather, Emile Hirsch) turning directly towards the camera and making a face. It's an overt acknowledgment of Penn's lens, and it's the first sign of the formal recklessness that ultimately defines the film.

• I've given a lot of thought lately to just driving off somewhere and disappearing.

• The film's incohesiveness and stylistic disparity were frustrating to me, but ultimately I think they provided the film a scope I don't think it would have had otherwise. When McCandless reaches the end of his journey, we're left with a palpable sense of the life - the big, wild, rambling life, soon lost - that lays behind him. It's a mess, but in a way that messiness works.

• I think Eddie Vedder may be a good musician. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to him.

• I hope Kirsten Stewart keeps making strong film choices. She may have played this sort of role before, but she sure nails it every time.

• The episode with the moose was one of the most memorable in the book. Likewise, it's one of the most striking in the film - primarily because it looks like that's a real dead moose that Hirsch is carving up. I hope it wasn't killed explicitly for the purpose of the film, but there's no denying the primal power its fallen form, hewn open and red, lends the sequence.

• Which leads, of course, to the fateful climax, which Penn seems to have modeled, quite effectively, after Brakhage's Dog Star Man.

• I'd actually like to see Penn's four hour cut. On that note, if anyone ever wants to talk about how amazing a film The Pledge is, I'm always game.

• Krakaeur ends his book much as he begins it, with the objective discovery of the boy in the bus. Penn, on the other hand, takes a completely subjective approach, and although there is tragedy implicit in the final shot, there is also a wild, exuberant triumph, with thundering drums and spiring visuals. It's also a CGI shot, which feels wrong somehow; but the irrationality of that choice only adds to the effect. It is an ending at odds with McCandless' accidental fate, while simultaneously serving as a perfect summation of that heedless, irresponsible and idealistic spirit of both Penn's subject, and Penn himself.
  

* * *

And on the completey opposite side of things - the stylistically precise, precisely confined - there is Wes Anderson's Hotel Chevalier. I was completely surprised at how moved I was by it, and also by how beautifully it was written. Take the same script and subject it to a different director and it would hold up, as raw and hurtful and full of hurt as it is through Anderson's twee perspective.

Or maybe I've just been sensitive lately. As I wrote in a comment on Michael Tully's review, I see in the film "a sort of broken hearted misogyny that I'm not particularly proud of but that I'm certainly a little too familiar with." When Schwartzman tells Portman that he'll never be friends with her, I loved him for saying it and hated myself for knowing exactly what he meant.

Posted by David Lowery at October 3, 2007 1:14 AM