Sean Penn (2007)

In 1990, a young Virginian called Chris McCandless graduated from Emory University, gave away his savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, and began travelling, assuming the name Alexander Supertramp and breaking off all communications with his family.   He was found dead two years later in a wilderness area of Alaska.   Sean Penn wrote the screenplay for Into the Wild from a book by Jon Krakauer (which intersperses the stories of other Americans who went into the wild with a biography of McCandless).  The film might have worked if Penn had been able to write McCandless so as to convey his uncompromising nature in a way that made him compelling (even if not necessarily likeable).  It might have worked with an actor like the young Sean Penn in the role, expressing tensions in the character and convincing you of McCandless’s magnetism – and that the people he meets en route would be fascinated by his obsessive wanderlust.   But Into the Wild is poorly written – Penn is evidently admiring of McCandless but can’t bring the character to life – and Emile Hirsch, who plays him, is no Sean Penn.   Hirsch may be a better actor than he seems here (the problem could be that he’s doing what his director wants him to do, and Penn is seeing what he wants to see).  Whatever the explanation, Hirsch doesn’t make McCandless interesting and I suspect the fact that this rebel always looks and sounds like a smug middle-class boy is an irony that’s unintended.

Penn appears to think that what McCandless chose to do was so remarkable in itself that it’s enough to sustain a two-and-a-half hour film, without clarifying the motives for his journey or revealing his character.  If those motives were confused, that might enrich the story; but because Penn seems to see McCandless as pure hero, the contradictions in the material come across as merely accidental.    We’re told (through the voice-over narration of McCandless’s sister Carine) that, in his final year at Emory, he scored nearly straight As and that he combined academic excellence with a strong social conscience.   McCandless can hardly have been the only student in his year to feel strongly about African famine and South African apartheid but his choice of these subjects for study is presented as evidence of his extraordinary qualities.   (The emotionally unresponsive lone wolf that he is on his journey is anticipated in what we learn about the undergraduate McCandless:  there’s no suggestion that he had any friends at university – or whether, for example, he took an interest in Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island, which occurred just a few months before McCandless graduated from Emory, or in the political events that followed in South Africa.)  There’s no explanation of why McCandless headed straight for the wilderness after graduation, without looking for socially useful work in the meantime:  his decision to donate his entire savings to Oxfam would be more interesting if, say, Penn had suggested that McCandless thought this was such a massive humanitarian gesture that he’d paid his social dues and could immediately devote himself to doing what he selfishly wanted to do.

Was McCandless inspired to go on his journey by reading and rereading Thoreau and Jack London – or was there a different underlying impulsion, which these writers increased or romanticised?  If so, did McCandless’s actual experience of the wilderness modify or enhance his admiration for them (and for Tolstoy and Pasternak, who are also in his backpack), or what?    Nothing that happens to McCandless seems to affect his feelings about the path he’s chosen;   if he seems vindicated in his decision to detach himself from urban civilisation, this appears to be thanks to a callowly implacable self-confidence.   (He briefly meets a young Swedish couple, who seem to be enjoying themselves and the landscape without McCandless’s moral burdens and philosophical pretensions.  I had no idea what he made of this encounter.) The extracts from his diary concentrate almost entirely on the physical problems and privations he experiences.  (Even a gruesomely graphic sequence in which he shoots a moose and its corpse is soon crawling with maggots appears to be recorded in the diary largely in physical terms.)  McCandless seems to have no capacity for self-reflection – and Emile Hirsch certainly doesn’t suggest any – until his final diary entry:  ‘Happiness is only real when shared’.   If we’re supposed to see that this has gradually been dawning on McCandless, the signs are hard to read; it’s a deathbed revelation out of nowhere.

What Chris McCandless appears to feel most strongly in the early scenes of Into the Wild is antipathy towards his mother and father.  The idea of a young man who wants to get his own back on his parents – by disowning their values in a physically extreme way, which causes them anguish and eventually kills him – is a potentially very strong subject for a tragicomedy (perhaps especially if we were made to feel that the son’s hostility was virtually a physically sustaining force).  Sean Penn’s presentation of this aspect of the material is especially chaotic.    Shortly after McCandless has started his journey, his sister’s narration tells us that he finds out that his parents’ marriage was a lie, concealed a physically abusive relationship etc, etc.  This, says the sister, completely changed Chris’s attitude towards his father and mother:  as he already couldn’t stand them, what changed?   (And, since we see a flashback to the physically abusive relationship being witnessed by the children, how was this a revelation to the young adult?)   Penn doesn’t seem to be able to decide (he may not care) whether the McCandless parents are egregious individuals or representatives of a way of life that deserves to be rejected.  This uncertainty shows in the performances of William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden; giving their considerable energies to roles so thinly and impersonally written makes their playing seem stridently overemphatic.  Jena Malone’s part as the sister is equally thankless (Penn hasn’t written in anything about how her relationship with her parents or her feelings about her brother altered after his disappearance).  Her narration is so unvarying in its emotional tone, regardless of what she’s describing, that the affectlessness of the McCandless children begins to seem congenital.

This is the sort of picture about which people will say that, even if it’s dramatically unsatisfying, of course the photography is wonderful.   I can’t comment on the technical aspects of this but the photography seems to me wonderful only in the sense that the landscape it describes is splendid – which we knew anyway and could be reminded of by a nature documentary.  What seemed to me more remarkable about the visual scheme of Into the Wild was that Sean Penn seems to regard Chris McCandless as such a heroic figure that he often doesn’t seem physically overwhelmed by the locations; he seems to fit their vastness.  Whether this is intentional or not I’m not sure but, because Emile Hirsch is such a small presence, the effect is to make some of the shots look as if they’ve come from a hubristic pop video that places a megastar in a physical setting his image-makers see as scaled to his celebrity status.

In The Pledge, Sean Penn handled the cast impeccably.  (In my experience, he’s the only director – so far – to have elicited a performance from Jack Nicholson where the subdued nature of the character he’s playing amounts to more than Nicholson suppressing his energy as a performer.)  Ernest Borgnine was skilfully directed in Penn’s segment of 11’09’01 – September 11.  What there is to enjoy and admire in Into the Wild comes from some of the characters whom McCandless meets on his odyssey – whom Penn treats with respect and who are played empathetically:   a farmer on the wrong side of the law (Vince Vaughan), an aging hippie couple (Brian H Dierker and Catherine Keener), a young girl (Kristen Stewart) who’s longing to sleep with McCandless, a lonely old leather worker (Hal Holbrook).   Some of these roles are condescendingly, schematically conceived:  the hippie woman is missing her son who went missing two years before; the old man lost his son (and his wife) in a traffic accident and cut himself off from life after that.  Yet the actors playing them – especially Holbrook, who transmits a blend of elation and distress at having been brought back to life emotionally through his encounter with McCandless – register in a way that makes it all the more frustrating that Emile Hirsch can’t express whether they are making any impression on him.   The ‘additional songs’, which seem to be greater in number than variety, are by Eddie Vedder.

13 January and 26 December 2008