Into the Wild

Director: Sean Penn
Cast: Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughan

This traces the couple of years that Christopher McCandless (Hirsch — reminiscent of a young Leonardo diCaprio, only with talent and charisma) spent on the road in the US before his death from starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska.

Despite being based on true events, the film is really magical realism: McCandless is an improbably insightful and winsome character, his encounters with people magnified and beatified by his early death.

This will annoy some people no end: why is he shown in such a positive light? He’s so self-absorbed, so selfish, so idiotic! (The film omits some facts that reveal how easy it would have been for him to survive.)

But the Romantic in me soared as I watched this film. This is due in no small part to the magnificent framing of the varied American landscape, and to the skilfully played, intimate characterizations that Penn has crafted. This sounds dull, but the true events and characters have been moulded to create an engaging pacing to match the emotional arc.

McCandless is someone who has faced the emptiness of much of his culture, and spurned it for the subversive naturalism and spiritualism of Romanticism’s heirs: Tolstoy, Thoreau, London, the beat poets.

However flawed an icon McCandless is, there is something in his story that should call out the wild in all of us, just a little.