Into the Wild

[Sean Penn on location for the shoot of 'Into the Wild']

Well. 2 years. A very long hiatus indeed.

I feel like I've been to Alaska and back, on my own harrowing personal journey.... possibly having died on the way and come back as a zombie... no, that's a different film. The one that prompted me to put finger to keyboard is none other than Sean Penn's directorial offering "Into the Wild".

Based on Jon Krakauer's book, who in turn based it on the terse jottings of the real life Christopher McCandless. If you've read Krakauer's Into Thin Air, or his article, you would understand my curiosity. The TV Guide's pithy one line synopsis made it sound less thatn compelling but Penn's past filmic genius spoke in its favour. And, whatever the average multiplex-goer (yup, that's me) might think of it, I surprised myself by enjoying this film. 

The journey that Christopher McCandless, a bright college graduate from California, takes across America is a pretty uncompromising one. I can think of another young man who made a similar journey, but one that ended in a profound accomplishment. Two thousand years ago in India, a young man called Siddhartha left his wife and child and headed into the wilderness seeking the truth.

What Christopher (Emile Hirsch) finds in the wild lands beyond Californian borders are a Hippie couple, a besotted 16 year old girl and a lonely old widower. The last two he proceeds to wound by rejecting their love while the first two he treats as ersatz parents. A saint this hero is not. He is also guilty of no little cockiness as he stands on a steep hill taunting an old man, who the climb could easily kill, and warbles 'King of the Road' while stowing away on a goods train. Nothing can stop his onward motion, nothing can stamp out his drive. Woven throughout the journey, later into the film's flow than most of us would have liked, are the clues to his driving need to move on. Bickering parents, forever on the brink of divorce but never quite rent asunder; a father with a dirty secret, a first wife he was still legally married to and a son that he had neglected; a life of materialist greed and petit-bourgeois ambitions. Yeah, so far, so boohoo you might say. Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch tread lightly on these worn-down tracks, richly mined by other indie filmmakers. Yet somehow it works.  Under Penn's sure direction, the flight 'away' from a dysfunctional family transforms convincingly into a quest for something, a moving towards and upwards. 

The camera, the light and the circuitous path of each scene feels constructed from a fragmented memory of some trauma. A hit-and-run victim lying on a baking hot road looking up at one's rescuers against the midday sun might feel like this.

Ultimately it is the wilderness into whose arms he fled, Nature red in tooth and claw, that defeats Christopher McCandless. I won't give away the ending. Suffice it to say all stories about city folk roughing it in the wild should realistically end this way. 

I can't say I liked where this film took me or what it had to show. But its enduring message still resonates. Happiness is only real when it is shared.

As a final caveat, it just hit me (its nearly midnight and I haven't slept much in, well, the past year) - why do I like these Boy's Own stories? They don't appeal to any other women I know. Somewhere inside me is a dirty-kneed 12 year old boy/girl still struggling up that hill, on the brink of some magnificent discovery. Frozen in time in that moment, before an ocean of hormones swamped him/her, Life overcame dream and she became a mother. That make sense?