Who, exactly, was Christopher McCandless? Was he a mystical visionary, a great adventurer in the Jack London tradition? Or a naive fool, a spoiled rich kid, the victim of a dysfunctional family, an emotional cripple? Into the Wild suggests that the answer could be any – and very likely all – of the above.
One thing is certain: McCandless took the road less travelled. A bright graduate, he was set for a career in law, when, one fine day, he burned his ID card, wrote a cheque to Oxfam for his entire savings and disappeared. Two years later, he would starve to death.
The young man hit the road, assuming the nom de route of Alexander Supertramp and heading, naturally, westward. When he had gone as far west as he could go, he carried on south, to Mexico. Then he turned around and went up north, to Alaska. That was where his journey ended.
On the way, he met other loners, hippies, society’s rejects and refuseniks, and the film, full of elation and a terrible poignancy, shows him moving, in tiny increments, towards the point where he might be able to form a meaningful human connection.
Into the Wild
Into the Wild comes from one of Hollywood’s most notorious tearaways (“screenplay and directed by Sean Penn,” as the credits clumsily put it), but it does not idealise the rebel.
It’s based on a biography by Jon Krakauer but is narrated by McCandless’s sister (played by Jena Malone), and although his family is shown harshly, her voice is a constant reminder of how much he was hurting them during his high-minded quest of self-discovery.
As McCandless, Emile Hirsch brings a sweetness and a red-blooded physicality to a character who remains, throughout, a bit of an enigma. His fascination with the wilderness makes this a peculiarly American story, but it will also touch parents, children and anyone who has fantasised about getting away from it all, forever.
