{"id":419,"date":"2007-11-12T17:26:19","date_gmt":"2007-11-12T21:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/419"},"modified":"2017-01-03T08:14:06","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T14:14:06","slug":"into-the-wild-2007-sean-penn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/419","title":{"rendered":"Into The Wild (2007, Sean Penn)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dude who looks an awful lot like Leo Dicaprio and will soon star in Speed Racer<\/a><\/em> plays Chris, who abandons his rich dysfunctional family (Marcia Gay Harden: Tim Robbins’ wife in Mystic River<\/em>, William Hurt: the killer brother in A History of Violence<\/em>, Jena Malone: Donnie Darko<\/a>‘s girlfriend) and heads into the wild. Along the way he makes himself a new family, two hippie parents (some dude and Catherine Keener), grandfather Hal Holbrook (star of Creepshow: The Crate<\/em>), and a sister (the girl from Panic Room<\/em>). Then he lets them all down by failing to eat properly out in the Alaskan wilderness.<\/p>\n

An emotional movie, full of warmth and humanity, but not enough of either for our main character who leaves it all behind to pursue his Alaskan dream. According to the movie\/diary he hoped\/intended to return before he was sidelined by an impassible river and some poisonous veggies.<\/p>\n

Movie walks the line between putting Chris forth as a hero, a role model, a visionary who got a few details wrong vs. a deluded kid whose family drove him to self-destruction, maybe slanted towards the latter. Some quick editing, lots of askew close-ups, foreground in a corner of the frame with something blurry happening in the large looming distance. A strange, interesting look to the movie with artistic intentions to be sure. An ambitious picture, almost all successful. I liked it a lot, but I have to say Grizzly Man<\/em> still has the edge.<\/p>\n

ADDENDUM: thanks to the Golden Globe award nominations, I am now remembering to mention that the Eddie Vedder songs were distracting.<\/p>\n

My new hero Nathan Lee of Slate on this movie:<\/p>\n

I immediately and powerfully sympathized with the questing hero \u2014 I, too, am a privileged young man undergoing an existential crisis! \u2014 but as his quest went on (and on and on and on and on), I found myself less and less invested. The trajectory of the movie proved emotionally frustrating but ethically acute: My gradual alienation from the “hero,” our ostensible audience surrogate, was replaced by empathy with all those marvelous supporting characters he encounters on his journey, a set of alternative families he briefly joins then abandons. Into the Wild<\/em> is a conventional treatment of the same theme contemplated through kaleidoscope in I’m Not There<\/a><\/em>. Both movies celebrate the thrill of personal reinvention while simultaneously attending to the spiritual toll of perpetual escape. Neither film is hagiographic; neither odyssey ends up feeling very heroic. If I’m Not There<\/em> packed the greater wallop for me, it’s probably because I connect on a deeper intellectual and emotional level to Haynes’ mega-meta technique than Penn’s nostalgic naturalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dude who looks an awful lot like Leo Dicaprio and will soon star in Speed Racer plays Chris, who abandons his rich dysfunctional family (Marcia Gay Harden: Tim Robbins’ wife in Mystic River, William Hurt: the killer brother in A History of Violence, Jena Malone: Donnie Darko‘s girlfriend) and heads into the wild. Along the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[158,95,620],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-biopic","tag-emory","tag-sean-penn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11698,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions\/11698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}