Into the Wild (2007) Review
7/10
A twenty-two-year-old graduates near the top of his class, donates his savings, burns the cash in his wallet, abandons his car, and spends two years moving west under another name before walking into the Alaskan interior in April with ten pounds of rice.
The 7 is for a beautifully made film with a judgment problem. The photography is superb, Emile Hirsch is excellent, and the encounters along the way are the best material in it. What the film can’t do is hold a position on whether any of this was a good idea.
Krakauer’s book is ambivalent and spends chapters on people who did similar things and died. The film is in love with its subject, and the gap between those two attitudes is where the two points come off.
I admire this film more than I like it. Penn shoots the West like he’s in love with it, and Hirsch gives McCandless a warmth that makes him easy to follow, but the Alaska stretches leave me arguing with the screen. A young man dies of a string of bad decisions, and the film keeps asking me to see a saint.
The Structure Works
Penn splits the film between the Alaska months, presented as chapters with titles, and the two years of travel that preceded them, cutting between the two.
That’s the right decision. Alaska alone would be a man alone in a bus, and the intercutting means the audience’s knowledge of where he ends up colors every encounter on the road.
The chapter headings are borrowed from the book and give the thing a shape it would otherwise lack. Birth, adolescence, manhood, family, and the getting of wisdom. That’s a considerable claim for the film to make on his behalf.
His sister narrates. That supplies the family’s perspective without requiring scenes. Carine explains what their parents were like and what his disappearance did to them, and her narration is the only sustained criticism the film permits itself.
Carine’s narration is the part of the structure I value most. She’s the only voice in the film allowed to say that he hurt people, and I wish Penn had given her twice the time.
Intercutting a known ending with the approach to it converts every earlier scene into dramatic irony at no cost. The reader watches a man decline help while knowing what the help would have prevented.
The technique needs the ending established early and without ceremony. Penn puts Alaska in the first five minutes, so the audience is never waiting for a reveal.
A narrator who’s not the protagonist can carry the criticism the story can’t say out loud. Carine says what the film won’t, and it comes from somebody with the standing to say it.
The Encounters Are the Film
Every person McCandless meets on the road is more interesting than the Alaska material, and the film is at its best when he’s with somebody.
Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker play a couple living out of a van who effectively adopt him, and Keener’s grief about her own estranged son is the film’s most honest treatment of what leaving does to the people left.
Vince Vaughn’s grain elevator operator is a good twenty minutes. A man who likes him, employs him, gets arrested, and is entirely unsentimental about any of it. It’s also the only stretch where McCandless does ordinary work alongside people for money and appears to enjoy himself. The film notices it in passing and never returns to it.
Kristen Stewart at sixteen plays a girl who’s interested in him and whom he declines, and the scene where he refuses is one of the few places the film suggests something might be wrong with him instead of admirable. Slab City and the desert community around it are shot as a real place with real residents, and the film is unusually good at establishing that these people have arrangements and histories of their own. McCandless passes through several functioning lives on his way to a bus with nobody in it.
Hal Holbrook
An eighty-year-old leather worker in the desert takes him in, teaches him a trade, and eventually asks to adopt him. Holbrook was eighty-two, was nominated for the performance, and is the only person in the film who says the true thing directly. He tells the boy that when you forgive you love, and that he should get back among people because they’re what life is.
The scene where he asks to be his grandfather is the best in the picture. It’s played quietly, the boy deflects, and Holbrook accepts the deflection with an old man’s practiced grace. That’s worse to watch than an argument would be. That scene alone is worth a point on my scale. Holbrook breaks my heart without raising his voice, and it’s the one moment in the film where I feel the full weight of what this boy was throwing away.
The film then sends McCandless away and returns to Holbrook once, driving into the desert alone. That’s the cost of the story stated plainly, and it’s the only time the picture gets there. Holbrook reportedly asked to do the scene in one take with the camera on him throughout, and whatever the truth of that, what’s on screen is an old actor doing something very difficult with no cutting to hide behind. He was eighty-two and had been working for fifty years.
One character who tells the protagonist the truth, early and clearly, changes what the rest of the story means. Everything afterward is a refusal instead of an ignorance.
The truth-teller should have no stake beyond affection. That’s why an old man works. He wants nothing, he gains nothing, and the offer costs him to make.
Return to them once. A single later shot of somebody who offered and was refused converts a scene into a consequence, and consequences turn a journey into a story.
The Admiration Problem
The film’s treatment of the actual decisions is the place it falls short. McCandless entered the Alaskan interior in April with a small bag of rice, a rifle, a book on plants and no map.
A map would have shown him a hand-operated cable crossing less than a mile from where he turned back at a swollen river. The film includes the river and doesn’t include the crossing. That’s the single most telling omission in it.
That omission is dishonest. Leaving out the crossing turns a fixable mistake into fate, and a film made this carefully knew what it was leaving out.
Krakauer is careful about all of this and the book is a sustained argument with itself about whether the boy was a romantic or a fool. The film resolves that argument in one direction and stages his death as a transcendence.
There’s also a real-world cost the film couldn’t have anticipated. The bus became a destination, several people were injured or died attempting the same crossing to reach it, and it was eventually removed by helicopter. A story that admires a decision reliably produces people who set out to repeat that same decision for themselves, with much the same equipment and in several cases very much the same result.
Eddie Vedder’s songs do a great deal of this work. They’re good songs and they’re entirely on his side, playing over the walking sequences with a conviction the film hasn’t otherwise earned. The parents get the same treatment from the other direction. Billy and Marcia are drawn as the reason he left, with a history of violence between them, and the film uses that to settle a question it should have left open. A young man with difficult parents isn’t thereby correct about anything.
The Ending
He eats something that makes him ill, can’t leave, becomes too weak to hunt, and writes in a book that happiness is only real when shared.
That line is the film’s thesis and it arrives about four minutes before the end. That’s very late for a conclusion the preceding two hours haven’t been building toward. The death itself is well handled. Hirsch had lost a great deal of weight, the bus is small and cold, and the last sequence is a young man working out that he’s made a mistake he can’t correct.
The moose is the sequence that should have been the film. He kills an animal far larger than he can process, tries to preserve the meat and fails, and watches several hundred pounds of food rot in front of him within days. It’s the clearest possible statement of what he didn’t know and the film moves past it quickly.
The moose is the scene I find hardest to watch before the ending. Seeing all that meat go to waste is the one stretch where the film shows me the gap between what he’d read and what the land demanded, and I wanted Penn to stay there far longer.
The final image imagines his parents at the moment they learn. That’s the film reaching for the thing it should have been about. What McCandless did to himself is a tragedy and what he did to his family is a story, and the film chooses the first for two hours and the second in the last ninety seconds.
If your thesis arrives in the last four minutes, it’s a conclusion instead of a subject. The reader should be able to feel the argument from the first act even if they can’t state it.
Ambivalence is harder to sustain than admiration and it’s almost always the better choice with a real person. A work that resolves the question stops being about the question.
Watch what your music is arguing. A score that’s unambiguously on the protagonist’s side will override anything the script is doing to complicate him, because readers feel tone before they weigh evidence.
Should you watch Into the Wild?
Yes, for the encounters and for Hal Holbrook.
The craft earns most of the 7, and Holbrook’s scene adds the rest. The points I take off are for the film’s crush on its subject. It’s a gorgeous movie about a boy who refused every person who offered him something, and it admires him for that in a way Krakauer’s book carefully doesn’t. I can’t go along with it.
