Captain Fantastic
Matt Ross (2016)
It could be the Danish connection or the Aragorn connection but Viggo Mortensen, although he was born in New York City, can seem somehow alien in urban American settings (in A History of Violence, for example). He naturally suggests determined intelligence too. The combination makes Mortensen well cast as Ben Cash, the protagonist of Captain Fantastic. Ben’s surname is misleading. He has abandoned capitalism in favour of survivalism and lives with his family in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Ben’s six children are receiving home schooling of an extraordinary kind. Under their father’s tutelage, they read widely and are encouraged to develop their critical thinking; they’re also physically super-fit, self-reliant hunter-gatherers. Ben and his wife Leslie are constructively non-religious: each December the family celebrates Noam Chomsky’s birthday rather than Christmas.
The countercultural idyll is marred by one big thing. Bipolar Leslie (Trin Miller) is no longer with her husband and children but in hospital, where her medical bills are paid by her parents, Jack (Frank Langella) and Abigail (Ann Dowd). Although Ben has foresworn ‘technology’, the family has a camper van and it’s a phone call that he makes on an outing into town that sets the film’s plot in motion. On the other end of the line, weeping Abigail tells Ben that Leslie has committed suicide; angry Jack yells that Ben’s ‘the worst thing that ever happened to this family’ and that he doesn’t want him at Leslie’s funeral. Ben is outraged that will involve a Christian service and burial: Leslie had left instructions that she wanted her body cremated and her ashes flushed down an easily available toilet. The latter sounds a perverse specification on the part of someone who’d chosen a no-mod-cons life but no matter: Ben sets off with the kids on a road trip to see that his wife’s will be done.
The writer-director Matt Ross has used a nifty, distinctive context in which to play out a familiar familial tale – of bereavement, simmering resentments that boil over at a funeral, rebellion against parental authoritarianism, reconciliation. Ben Cash may be full of contradictions but he’s not in the same league as Ross, who’ll stop at nothing to contrive a dramatic or comic payoff and is fearless in the face of cliché. In the first scene of Captain Fantastic, the children and their father pop up in the forest their faces smeared in woad (or something); the eldest son Bodevan (George MacKay) kills a deer and Ben bids him eat the animal’s heart, uttering the time-honoured words, ‘You were a boy: now you’re a man’. (George MacKay is actually in his mid-twenties and a bit old for the part.) If his hero is Noam Chomsky – a member of the MIT faculty since 1955 – why is Ben so antipathetic to liberal, secular higher education that Bodevan (Bo) has had to make secret applications to Ivy League universities because his father doesn’t want him to go to college? (Bo has prepared the applications supposedly with Leslie’s help though it’s not clear how they were produced or transmitted.) We’re told the family moved into the wild before the younger children were born; Ben considers organised religion uniquely pernicious. How come, when a traffic cop pulls the camper over because of a dodgy taillight and asks Ben suspicious questions, the kids disarm the cop by breaking into Christian song to prove their father’s home schooling is bona fide religious? An underlying question of the set-up, and one that remains unanswered: what does Ben expect his kids to do once they’ve become adults?
I suppose the answer to all these questions is that it doesn’t matter. Matt Ross isn’t going to be deflected from setting up audience-pleasing oppositions: his awareness of that audience – and what Richard Brody has called its ‘counter-superheroic expectations’ – is reflected even in the film’s title. It’s a surprise to see the family in a supermarket and a shock when Ben collapses there with an apparent heart attack but he’s only pretending. While he’s being attended to, the kids make a quick exit with the shopping, Ben assures the worried supermarket staff he’s OK and the family – irresistible subversive rascals that they are – drives off without paying. Ben and the children make a brief, disastrous visit – en route to the funeral – to Leslie’s sister (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband (Steve Zahn). This couple’s adolescent sons (Elijah Stevenson and Teddy Van Ee) are interested only in computer games and shamed by eight-year-old Zaja Cash (Shree Crooks)’s articulate summary of the meaning of the Bill of Rights. Captain Fantastic takes place in a world where you have to go into the wilderness in order to read a book. Ben’s children’s reading, ranging from Middlemarch to an introduction to quantum physics, is prescribed by their father. When one of the older girls, Kielyr (Samantha Isler), announces that she’s well into Lolita, you wonder how she got hold of it. The main purpose of Kielyr’s conversation with Ben about Lolita and Humbert is to enable the youngest child Nai (Charlie Shotwell) to ask his father what’s rape, what’s a penis, what’s a vagina …
Little movie kids have been asking adults embarrassing questions for many years – Ben, of course, isn’t embarrassed and provides calmly informative answers to Nai. The kid knows when to stop, though, and doesn’t follow up by asking what’s a urethra: indeed, Matt Ross ensures the children’s impressively wide reading hasn’t made them curious enough to compare their own experiences to those of people in books or raised issues that lead them to press Ben to justify the family’s way of life. When Bo meets and is instantly attracted to a real teenage girl, he’s as clueless as if he really were the enfant sauvage implied in the film’s opening rite-of-passage number – rather than the boy that Harvard, Yale and Princeton are, as we discover, queuing up to admit. The embarrassment of his clumsy romantic overtures is enough for Bo to accuse Ben of leaving his book-learned kids unequipped for real, practical life. It’s the standard invective against an intellectual in a movie but seems hard on a man who’s taught his sons and daughters to slaughter large animals and climb sheer cliffs, who gives them hunting knives and crossbows as Noam Chomsky Day presents.
When she asks his name, Bo tells the girl he meets it’s Bodevan; when she asks what sort of a name that is, Bo explains his parents gave him and each of his siblings a unique name to reflect their unique individuality. This struck me as the clinching illustration of Ben Cash’s tunnel-vision arrogance: the USA is so especially rich in inconceivable forenames that coming up with a new one is an impossibly tall order (if Ben allowed himself access to the internet he would know that he and Leslie had failed). Maybe the abbreviation of Bodevan’s name to the common-or-garden Bo is a mark of incipient resistance – although it’s his scowling, narrow-eyed younger brother Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) who’s the prime mover in questioning their father’s project. Ben’s hijacking of his wife’s church funeral service triggers full-scale hostilities between him and Leslie’s father, and the children’s minor rebellion against Ben. After Rellian moves in with his grandparents, Ben oddly gives the job of ‘rescuing’ her brother from his bedroom to Vespyr (Annalise Basso). She falls from the roof and nearly breaks her neck. This is enough to make Ben feel guilty and decide all the children are better off with Jack and Abigail. He goes sadly on his way but the kids prefer him really and hide in the camper, and then spring forth and bring tears to their father’ s eyes. Off they all go to carry out their late mother’s crematory wishes, the mission culminating in an airport toilet. By the end of the film, Jack and Abigail have been forgotten about; Bo has temporarily parted from his father and siblings on good terms (I wasn’t clear if he was off to university or to-find-himself: in either case, money’s no object); and Ben has shaved off his wild-man beard. He’s living with the other kids on a farm, and all five are now going to school. This weak finale wants it both ways: it seems meant to imply that Ben has learned to compromise but that neither he nor the children have sold out.
Although one of the more persuasive things in Captain Fantastic is that Ben Cash’s wife decides to slit her wrists, you have to admire Viggo Mortensen’s ability to combine dogmatism with warmth and humour in a way that makes Ben tolerable company for a couple of screen hours. Mortensen is transformed by becoming clean-shaven – Ben’s loss of facial hair is almost Samsonic. It’s clear, as Sally said when we finished watching the film, that Mortensen enjoyed working with the youngsters and vice versa. They’re all good enough, although one or two have a whiff of stage school rather than home schooling about them. The vastly more experienced George MacKay gives an honestly felt, if unsurprising, performance. Frank Langella, Ann Dowd, Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn all make (a few) bricks from straw.
28 January 2017