“We all carry some conditioning or fraud around on our backs…when you go out into the relentlessly authentic circumstances of the natural world, you get outnumbered [by nature], and no place does that like Alaska.”
So said Sean Penn in a phone interview with The Varsity for his fourth film as director, Into the Wild. Penn, who has already been near-universally recognized as one of the best actors of his generation, has in recent years proven himself to be similarly talented behind the camera. His last directorial effort, 2001’s The Pledge, contained one of Jack Nicholson’s best performances, and Into the Wild, based on a book by John Krakauer, itself based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, is garnering strong reviews, as well as that most pretentious of film industry phrases, “Oscar buzz.”
“I bought the book and I found myself reading it cover-to-cover twice the day I bought it,” said Penn. “And there was something that spoke, for lack of a better word, ‘freedom’ about it, something that seemed very present at the time, and then over all the years that it took before I was able to make it, it’s just stuck with me.”
“In a broader sense, I think that I was borrowing [McCandless’] complications to dramatize things that are part of all of our lives.”
Christopher McCandless was a university graduate born to a troubled but affluent family. Shortly after his schooling, McCandless shredded his credit cards and left his family without a word to live a freer, more natural life, with the ultimate goal being to live in Alaska. Into the Wild dramatizes his journey and stars Emile Hirsch as McCandless, with a strong supporting cast that includes Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, and, in the film’s best performance, Hal Holbrook.
Into the Wild is further proof that Penn is a director to be reckoned with. It is well acted and poetic, and evokes a genuine sense of wonder at the natural world. On the experience of filming on location, Penn said, “Mountains were steeper, they were rockier, bigger, rivers were more muscular, everything was what I call nature on steroids. It was so alive and big and wondrous—you never got bored of it. It didn’t take a naturalist to get interested in the environment there. In the best sense you’d feel small.”
While it is easy to admire Into the Wild, it’s hard to fully embrace it as the masterpiece it clearly aspires to be because McCandless often comes across as selfish and short sighted. To Penn’s credit, while he clearly respects McCandless, he is not blind to his flaws.
“I’m not a big believer of gigantic, cathartic leaps too much. I haven’t observed them in other people or my own life that much,” said Penn. “But in those little ways you can really feel the reality of that natural world, and you can find out what part of it you can bring back and make more real of the organized world that we live in, and kinda mess it up a little bit and then see how it falls back into place in a way that seems to suit a quality of life better than the one that exists now.”
Into the Wild is currently in wide release.
