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Into the Wild

Directed and written by Sean Penn

Starring Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook

Classification: 14A

Rating: **1/2

You've just finished university and, after all those years adhering to authority's agenda, you put your murky future on hold and opt for a freewheeling, postgrad trip through the ongoing present – maybe to the capitals of Europe, perhaps to continents more remote. That's worthy but trite; most of us have done it. What makes Chris McCandless unique is the way he did it, the extremes of his behaviour, and the eventual price he paid. During his travels, in the early nineties, McCandless took the path of excess, and, of course, the romantic temptation is to conclude that it led to the palace of wisdom. In his book, Into the Wild, writer Jon Krakauer resisted that temptation; in this adaptation, director Sean Penn does not – and therein lies the problem.

For Penn, a serious guy with a rebel reputation, it's not hard to see what drew him to this material. After all, here's a kid who, high on the transcendent prose of Tolstoy and Thoreau, waved goodbye forever to big, bad civilization – rejecting his privileged background, abandoning his family, donating his trust fund to charity, burning his social security card, and, like all those other American dreamers, heading west for the freedom to be found in nature sublime. Two years later, the path bent north to Alaska and nature turned ferocious. Chris perished alone, deep in the wilderness, leaving behind a few jottings and the abiding mystery that fuelled Krakauer's book: Was he a rugged individualist, perpetuating a proud tradition, or just a crazy individual, well-intentioned but so young and woefully misguided?

Penn never really grapples with the question. Instead, he tips his hand early by opening with a quote from Byron (“I love not man the less, but Nature more”), and, from there, is reluctant to inject too much anti- into his hero. The script immediately tracks Chris (Emile Hirsch) to his end point in the Alaskan barrens, where he finds shelter and his final rest in a derelict school bus. Using that campsite as its own home base, the film flashes back through the “chapters” of the journey, finishing with one whose title, “The Getting of Wisdom,” pretty much telegraphs the Blakean message.

En route, our picaresque lad crosses the continent – up mountains, down rapids, over deserts – breaking and touching hearts as he goes. Inevitably, the broken-hearted include the family he's running from and has severed all contact with – his parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) and his sister (Jena Malone), who doubles as the voice-over narrator. Having acquired their needed permission for the rights to the project, Penn is understandably reluctant to portray the family as anything more than victims themselves. However, that leaves a vacuum where a motive should be, since Chris's relations with them are a partial key to understanding his adventurous obsession.

The episodic structure tries to fill this void via encounters with ersatz parents along the way. Some of these sequences are lightly comic (Vince Vaughn's insouciant roughneck), others are delicately poignant (Catherine Keener as a chronic hippie clinging to the communal highways; Hal Holbrook as an aged loner longing to make one final connection – both their cameos are affecting). From a tale that too often is simultaneously long-winded and high-minded, these moments of poignancy are a welcome reprieve. Their emotion is palpable, solid, but then it's back to the same hot-airiness. Even the natural grandeur of the country, which should be a character in itself, seems evanescent here. Unsure of how to shoot the locations, whether to go for documentary grittiness or elevated myth-making, Penn and his camera split the difference. The effect is to undercut the very force that drives Chris – his quest for elemental nature.

Consequently, the picture is weak where it should be strongest – at the core of its central figure. Hirsch splendidly captures the ingenuous arrogance of youth, its capacity for true belief that, unlike the hardened middle-age version, is attractive and near-admirable. And, literally tightening his belt as Alaska takes a toll on his body, he shows a De Niro-like valour in assuming the physical demands (pounds lost and gained) of the role. Yet, despite Penn's pushing him toward Tolstoyan epiphanies, his Chris remains a cipher, less a mystery than a blank slate – or, at least, a slate scribbled only with borrowed musings.

The result is a road movie with a lofty message that too frequently gets lost in its own thematic barrens. Whereas Krakauer's disturbing book sticks with you, Penn's movie, wrapped in the balloon of its fanciful rhetoric, just floats off. On the screen, Into the Wild vanishes into thin air.

Into the Wild opens today in Toronto; on Oct. 6 in Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa; in Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg and Halifax on October 19.