Sean Penn interprets Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild

A city girl like me can’t even make a fire, and I cried over the lack of indoor plumbing during last year’s cottage adventure. I’m not exactly high-maintenance, but you won’t find me cozying up with Thoreau anywhere there’s unplowed snow or mosquitoes.

I didn’t read Jon Krakauer’s amazing Into the Wild because I’m the mountaineering type but because I find crazy people so interesting. And any kid who wants to plunge himself into the heart of an Alaskan winter is a crazy person in my mind, but Chris McCandless’s dismissal of societal hypocrisy and his love of poetry drew me in. This kid gave away the 25 grand in his bank account and began a tour of America penniless, rejecting the false security of a Harvard future, finding his parents’ society a total joke. He hated the way people treated each other, and he believed God’s joy could be found in fearless interaction with nature, not in the disappointing relationships we have with others.

Krakauer traced Chris’s steps, showing his journals along the way, right up until his final months, where he starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness. The book was stunning. I believed the journey was a sure suicide and the kid knew that- he was willing to die alone. Krakauer was certain the kid felt invincible, and his luck at other adventures on the way made him foolhardy. Either way, the seeming callousness of McCandless for ditching his family is never quite resolved. His ghost would be more peaceful for all that he lived and died by his dream quest, except it seems he had no forgiveness in him for their phony world of the upper crust. He died for their sins, and that leaves the beauty of the story so uneasy. And while I do fully relate to his puerile purity, the truth is we do have a heart of darkness, and that fact seemed so injurious to him, a kid who walked around like a raw wound. If solitary adventure made him happy, all the power, but if he’d lived a bit longer, he would have come to realize, as we all do, that we can’t fix the problems of the world just by living without toilet paper for a couple of months. I think he could have found happiness as a farmer or woodsman, making a tender mate for a lucky girl.

Seldom is a film based on a book any good. But Sean Penn moves behind the scenes and directs his protégé Emile Hirsch with brilliant sensitivity, refusing sentimentality, and writing down the bones. A more fitting tribute to a gentle and disturbed young man would have been impossible.  Alex Supertramp, as Chris called himself along the way, meets various American characters- a bunch of hippies, an old military codger, some redneck farmers (Vince Vaughn is splendid in this brief part- he’s always a surprisingly good actor). They are all drawn to the strange young man. They all ask him to call his family. For a film whose story takes place mostly as a one-man band in the Alaskan wilderness, the editing never slows. Majestic landscapes and poetic conversations are artfully blended alongside an emotive score by Eddie Veder. This is a truly unique masterpiece, and quite possibly the only outdoor adventure film since Alive for which you’ll need a box of Kleenex.