Movie review: 'Into the Wild' a harrowing, touching trip

Adapting a true story into a feature film is a delicate business. Reality is a sprawling thing that interweaves disparate threads to create a larger whole that only reveals its design in retrospect. Condense it too much and the connections begin to look forced, simplistic. Refrain from shaping it and you've got a mess.

Occasionally, though, a fact-based drama unfolds with the natural rhythm of life, letting us discover the significance of the account a bit at a time. Such a film is "Into the Wild," an enthralling story based on the odyssey of Christopher McCandless, who stepped away from the promising career path that opened to him after college and set off for a solitary life in the Alaska wilderness.

McCandless gave $24,000 in savings to charity, put a few belongings in a backpack and hit the road alone without training or preparation, rechristening himself Alexander Supertramp. He had no interest in being a social climber. He wanted to be a mountain climber.

The movie is shot on location in locales of amazing natural beauty, and much of it is charged with an exhilarating sense of freedom. Yet "Into the Wild" is one of the sadder movies director Sean Penn has made, which is saying something.

McCandless' journey of independence was also a callous slap at his family. He left without a word to his parents, punishing them for a childhood that was materially comfortable but an emotional shipwreck. Penn opens the film with the gasping, wracked face of Marcia Gay Harden, who plays McCandless' mother, Billie, shocked awake by a sense in her soul that her son is not dead.

Penn, working from the bestseller by Jon Krakauer, shuffles the chronology of McCandless' adventures like a deck of cards. At times it seems as though he's mimicking the thumb-tripper's wandering, but the time-fracturing approach builds considerable cumulative power. Penn isolates key moments, arranging them for maximum interest and variety and suspense, deftly charting a complex story. Things occur in the order necessary to build our understanding of McCandless' contradictory nature. As the story progresses, we feel we're coming to know him better than he understands himself.

Emile Hirsch plays the vagabond as a bright, stubborn idealist who is also foolhardy; he's resilient, but not as tough or well-equipped for survival as he imagines. It's a convincing performance, full of joy and youthful bravado shading into melancholy as events conspire against him.

Although he aims to live outside of society, McCandless is likable and gregarious, essential qualities for a traveler dependent on the kindness of strangers. Along his route he's befriended by a cross-section of American types, touching their lives as they touch his. For the hippie couple Jen and Rainey (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), he's a reminder of her lost son, and the spark that reignites their fading relationship. He's a surrogate younger brother for Wayne (Vince Vaughn), an amiable bachelor farmer. Retired military man Ron (Hal Holbrook) admires his vitality, but implores him to be more cautious, understanding, but not saying, that the excitement of freedom has robbed the boy of all common sense.

As McCandless explores these relationships, his father, Walt (William Hurt), and mother wait in anguished uncertainty. The acting is unforced but deeply moving, and Hirsch's headstrong, extroverted performance is simply beautiful.

Penn objectively records events with directness and simplicity, not encouraging us to admire McCandless or condemn him. This is not a message picture. What honest portrait of a life could be? Instead, Penn introduces us to characters and lets us decide about them. He takes us to the outskirts of civilization -- a shabby community of squatters on an abandoned Army base, a Los Angeles homeless shelter, the glorious northern California coast, a mountaintop art project constructed by an old desert rat, a nudist encampment -- and lets the reality of things speak for itself.

When he arrives in Alaska's deep woods, McCandless takes shelter in an abandoned city bus that had been gutted and outfitted with a wood stove. He has packed a rifle, a handbook of edible plants, a bag of rice and several volumes of Russian literature. He is where he has always dreamed of being. The panorama of snowcapped mountains is magnificent. What does it matter that winter is closing in?

As McCandless' fate unfolds, we have to ask ourselves if "Into the Wild" is a story of courage and determination or selfish, bone-headed egocentrism. The answer, I think, is: yes. The film, I am convinced, is unforgettable.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186