Directed by Sean Penn
Starring Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook
Into the Wild is based on the true story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate from a posh family who abandons his privileged existence for a life of hitchhiking, living off the land, and go-with-the-flow spirituality. He sends his life savings to OxFam, scissors his credit cards, and burns his identification. He’s reborn as “Alexander Supertramp;” lone wanderer of the American landscape.
Chris is an intelligent and earnest young man. Sick of modern civilization and its crass materialism (he rejects his parents’ offer of a new car as a graduation present), he finds inspiration in the pages of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Jack London. The holy grail of his quest for spiritual enlightenment is Alaska, a place where he can be alone to “just be out there in it. You know, big mountains, rivers, sky, game. Just be out there in it, you know? In the wild.”
Along the way, Chris encounters a series of people who help and encourage him in his goal. They become like an adoptive family; replacements of the damaged family he was born into. Indeed, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that Chris’ relentless pursuit of a new identity in an empty landscape has as much to do with his broken family life as with naïve idealism. As the audience gains insight into the trauma of his childhood—the lies, the deceitfulness, the abuse, and the rancor—his rejection of worldly things begins to look more and more like a sadistic revenge on the parents who poisoned his childhood. He takes off “into the wild” to get away from human contact without ever telling his family what he’s done or where he’s going.
Sean Penn’s lyrical and intimate directing style owes a debt to Terrence Malick, who directed Penn in The Thin Red Line. The lush images of sunsets, soaring birds, and falling water seem to reinforce Chris’ Romantic vision of man’s spiritual relationship to nature—the movie even opens with a quote from Byron—and when Chris says, “You don’t need human relationships to be happy, God has placed it all around us,” you wonder if Penn perhaps endorses this reductive view of life.
Then something happens in the second half of the film that casts Chris’s journey in a new light. In the final chapter of the movie (Penn, adapting the screenplay from Jon Krakauer’s book, structures it like his source material) Chris meets Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook), a retired Army man and devout Catholic. They develop a quiet, unassuming friendship based on sympathy and understanding. Ron, having heard of Chris’ family troubles, tells him: “When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.” This chapter of the film is titled: “The Getting of Wisdom.”
The tragedy of Into the Wild is that Chris refuses the grace offered through the relationship with Ron, whose life of hope and love is the true holy grail of spiritual enlightenment, not Alaska. Ron invites Chris to stay with him as an adopted grandson, but Chris, in his restlessness, rejects the kindly old man’s offer and continues on his way to the vast emptiness of Alaska.
But Ron’s vision of life as forgiveness and love returns to Chris in his loneliness and isolation in the wilderness. In his mind’s eye, Chris sees his joyful return to his family, embracing them in the life-giving love made possible by forgiveness. In his mind, he asks them: “What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?” He sees the clouds parting and God’s light shining on him in his stricken loneliness.
There he remains, sick and starving in the Alaskan wilderness, “trapped in the wild” as he writes in his journal. His final insight is scribbled into the margins of his tattered copy of Tolstoy: “Happiness is only real when shared.”
