Into the Wild
(PG)

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A humanist back-to-nature adventure evolves into an existential survivalist drama in this true-life story directed by Sean Penn. With little more than a water jug, a hunting rifle, a guide to edible berries and rough notes on how to cure game meat, young hiker Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) packs in to Alaska's gorgeous, remote Denali preserve in the shadow of Mt. McKinley. The stranger who drops him off at the end of the snowbound access road calls out to him, "Give me a call if you make it out alive!" Days into the uncharted, 10,000-square-mile frozen wilderness, Chris sets up camp in a rusted old bus and writes a journal chronicling his path to "ultimate freedom" from material goods and people. His only company is the occasional moose or bear.

Flash back two years to 1990 when Chris, a new Emory graduate and self-designated loner, donates his law school fund to Oxfam, burns his ID and social security cards and altogether drops out of society, disappearing without a trace from his family (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden). He hitchhikes across the country under the assumed (and poetic) name Alexander Supertramp. Over two years, "Alex" kayaks the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to Mexico. He hitches a ride from simpatico hippies Rainey and Jan (Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener). He earns a few bucks at a South Dakota grain elevator working for Wayne (Vince Vaughn). He passes some time with squatters in Southern California's Slab City. He sleeps in the Colorado Desert and becomes unlikely friends with an old widower (Hal Holbrook). But he never attaches himself to any of the kind, colorful characters he meets along the way and never lets them get too close to him.

Disappearing from one's loved ones, premeditated, without a word, is cruel. So, is Chris's journey misguided youthful idealism gone extreme, as we initially suspected? Is he a real-life Holden Caulfield? Is he a courageous Thoreau-like reinvention of himself? Our perception of Chris is forever shifting, the more we learn about his past.

Penn's high-minded populist screenplay, adapted from Jon Krakauer's 1996 true-life story of Christopher J. McCandless, is intensely personal, philosophical, often wordless and, yet, thoroughly literary. In fact, the movie lists Chris's easily recited quotations -- from Tolstoy, Thoreau, Byron, et. al. -- in the closing credits, before the credits for Eddie Vedder's howling, soulful (and also wordless) score. Wildly entertaining, beautifully acted and thought-provoking, Sean Penn's Into the Wild is organic food for the soul and a fantastic voyage.

by Rob. Walton

credit: Top: Francois Duhamel; middle and bottom: Chuck Zlotnick. ©2007 by Paramount Vantage, a division of Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.