INTO THE WILD

YOUR GREAT ADVENTURE ON ALASKA

Director: Sean Penn

Writer: Jon Krakauer (book)

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LAuzT_x8Ek

“Into the Wild “is a biography on the life of Christopher McCandless.

The film is set in the early ’90s, when Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who is just out of college, leaves the privileged life he has known to become a self-styled vagabond. He exits his existence, donating his savings ($24,292) to Oxfam, dropping out in the style of a ’60s hippie-tramp who’s trashed all ambition.

Here, though, there is no counterculture to second his voyage. He’s spiritually out on his own. Christopher isn’t rebelling against anything too remarkable. On the road, he gripes about the evils of ”society,” and he nurses family wounds.

The beauty of Into the Wild, which Penn has written and directed with magnificent precision and imaginative grace, is that what Christopher is running from is never as important as what he’s running to.

Into the Wild delivers his journey to your senses.

The people Christopher meets, and touches, along the way are as much a part of the trip as his crash course in wilderness survival. Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as hippie wanderers, Hal Holbrook (in a luminous performance) as an old man cocooned in his loneliness — these are quietly distressed hangers-on of the sort you rarely see in movies. You can feel Penn, along with his hero, struggling to locate a hidden America.

lights, camera, action

eskapeartist