For ten years Sean Penn had a vision of a movie he wanted to produce but couldn’t get the rights to make. In 2006 his dreams became reality when the parents of an extraordinary young man finally decided to allow Penn to make the film Into the Wild, based on their son’s life.
The Story
Christopher McCandless was a young man struggling to find his identity and place in society much like many other college students his age. Unlike other students he decided, right after graduating form Emory University, to stage his disappearance from civilization and begin a journey across the country. His ultimate goal was to make it to Alaska where he would live in the wilderness far away from the comforts of modern society.
In 1992 his adventures tragically ended when Alaskan moose hunters found the body of 24-year-old McCandless in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. The autopsy showed starvation as the cause of his death. In the two years preceding, McCandless influenced and befriended many people he met on his travels. These people, along with diaries McCandless kept, tell the story of an extraordinary man determined to abandon all the comforts of modern society for a life on the road.
The Movie
Sean Penn’s movie, based on the 1996 bestselling book Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, could easily have become a depressing portrait of a young man struggling to fit in to modern society. Instead Penn manages to transfer Christopher McCandless’ travels across the country to his final resting place in Alaska, into a beautiful, inspiring, life-confirming movie.
The film portrays the development of McCandless from a young boy struggling with anger through his rebellion against his parents and the world around him into his total abandonment of modern society.
Penn stays very true to the book with only a few alterations and ad-ons to McCandless diaries and the stories told by family and friends.
The movie jumps between past and present with no chronology and often leaps between meetings with interesting personalities on the road and childhood in the McCandless house. The cinematography is amazing as it takes the audience through breathtaking landscapes across the country, through the Arizona Desert, down the Colorado River, to the Mexican Gulf, before heading north to Alaska.
Without the perfect cast, the movie would have fallen flat but the choice of somewhat unknown Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless proved perfect as the young actor with his baby face and charm finds his way to the hearts of the audience. The real Christopher McCandless is said to have had the same effect on people who met him along the way.
