Freedom quest

Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) hits the road in search of happiness in Sean Penn's Into The Wild. (Chuck Zlotnick/Paramount Vantage Pictures)

Chris McCandless’s body had wasted to the weight of a large sack of potatoes when he was discovered in 1992, starved to death in the back of an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wild. He left behind a grieving, well-to-do East Coast family. He was 24 years old.

So how is his a happy story? Certainly, McCandless believed that he had truly tasted happiness, the rare kind that comes with loosing one’s soul in the world. Sean Penn, who wrote and directed the adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction bestseller Into the Wild, agrees: his film of McCandless’s last years is shot through with such tenderness and optimism that the saga’s inherent tragedy is shoved to the back seat. Penn takes the pieces of McCandless’s two-year picaresque journey across the continent and turns them into a heartfelt paean to freedom, that most American of themes.

In 1990, McCandless graduated from college and eschewed Harvard Law School for a different investigation, following the bidding of his heroes John Muir and Jack London. A young literalist, McCandless saw these writers — and others, including Tolstoy, Thoreau, Louis L’Amour — as urging him to follow a life of adventure in pursuit of a greater truth: find the land and find yourself. He donated his $24,000 school fund to Oxfam, burnt his cash and took off for the libertarian dream.

Do you hate him yet? Raised in Vancouver, I know these hemp-y, righteous outdoors types; their fingernails might be dirtier, but the “me, me, me” mantra is not so different from that of the most hard-blowing, bespoke suit-wearing capitalist. Indeed, Krakauer’s book includes the grumblings of many people, especially Alaskans, who wrote off McCandless as a gone-native idiot.

But that’s not exactly right. By most accounts from those who knew him, McCandless was a thoughtful person, and not entirely rash (though he might have benefited from the purchase of a good map). On film, the young actor Emile Hirsch lends the boy an undeniable loveliness; he’s a sweet, fiercely determined kid with a naive streak an ocean wide.

As he travels up and down North America, even kayaking across the border to Mexico, McCandless attempts to shut off all human contact. Byron’s “I love not man the less, but Nature more,” is one of the many quotes that flash on the screen in youthful, journal handwriting.

Free-spirited Tracy (Kristen Stewart, left) befriends Chris (Emile Hirsch) in Into the Wild. (Chuck Zlotnick/Paramount Vantage Pictures)

And yet, the closer McCandless got to the emptiness, the more people he gathered to his bosom. Furthering his contradiction, he seemed to thrive among these new friends. He earned money working combines on a farm run by a hard-partying good ol’ boy (played by Vince Vaughn, whose business card should read: “Big Man Comic Relief”). In one particularly poignant passage, Hal Holbrook plays a lonely widower quietly transformed by the grubby hitchhiker. McCandless also connects with an aging hippie couple, Rainey (Brian Dierker) and Jan (Catherine Keener), “rubber tramps” criss-crossing the country by trailer.

All these brief encounters make it feel as if Penn shot the film from the sky, looking down at an America dotted with people living off the grid. This unnamed citizenry is searching for some kind of connection through isolation, and reinventing the idea of family at each stop.

Exuding a wounded maternal spirit, Jan looks lovingly at McCandless across a campfire one night, and asks him about his parents. “They’re off living their lie somewhere,” says Chris, unusually hardened. She tells him to reconsider his contempt: “You look like a loved kid,” and it’s true.

McCandless’s father Walt (William Hurt) and mother Billie (Marcia Gay Harden, shellacked and anxious) had severe marital problems, but they were hardly monstrous. Yet McCandless sees the world in black and white terms, and his parents don’t live up to his standards. There are flickers of mental instability in Hirsch’s performance, but mostly, McCandless seems to suffer from generic youthful certainty; his is the kind of unattainable world view that people grow out of, but sadly, McCandless never had the chance.

In his previous films as a director (The Crossing Guard, The Pledge), Penn’s technical skill was obvious, but he too often seemed at a remove from the emotional centre of the material; you could feel him struggling to matter, but not to feel. With Into the Wild, he does lumber through some painful indulgences: too much text on the screen; too much Eddie Vedder doing song-as-subtitle scoring; a cumbersome voiceover by McCandless’s sister (Jena Malone). But mostly — and bless him for doing so — Penn lightens up. When McCandless has a perfect moment eating an apple in the middle of sublime nowhere, and grins foolishly at the camera between bites, we can all relax: the director is going to trust us to fall for this kid and his sidelong way of seeing the world.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Penn, so openly critical of his government in Iraq, has made a film about what one does in the name of freedom. Like McCandless, he’s on a quest for a country that may not even exist anymore. But as both men know, the beauty — and maybe even the truth — is in the looking.

Into the Wild opens on Sept. 28 in Toronto. It will open in Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa on Oct. 6; in Edmonton on Oct. 12; in Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Halifax and London on Oct. 19.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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