Film/ Into the Wild

Based on a true story, Snow White goes on an arctic safari, dressed in the Emperor's New Clothes. "Into the Wild" (2007), with screenplay and directed by Sean Penn, the unquestionably sincere humanitarian and gifted actor, is ultimately an unconvincing collection of calendar art and cliche, strong-armed by good intentions into a predictable and neutered propaganda piece of mono-dimensional caricatures.

A Road Film with no journey, just movement, "Into the Wild" is self-defeating in its blinkered view of the young central character who, in all his vast wanderings, seems to discover nothing he didn't already know, thanks to Byron, Tolstoy, Thoreau, et al- except, perhaps, what poisonous plants to avoid.

Sadly, "Alex" comes off as a narcissistic and frozen personality incapable of maturation, of being moved by actual experience. Though his style and focus are completely different, he embodies the same narrow-minded, fixated willfulness and impermeability as his cruel father. Son and father also share an approach to life that is decidedly mental: dad is a genius aerospace engineer- and emotionally sentimental; both blame others for their volatility. The father lashes out at his wife; the son is his own target.

"People" and "Society" are destructive and bad- the young man runs from a truly traumatic and difficult childhood. Luckier than most, he encounters more than a new family's-worth of characters--among them an old widower played with shocking and quiet complexity by Hal Holbrook--all hopelessly honest, loving and generous, but the young man remains unhealed and unheal-able. He can allow that the people and society he meets along the way are good and supportive as long as it doesn't really matter, or change his plans. He appears unable to be touched rather than determined.

He is all blindness and surface. Chock full of childhood hate, disappointment and disillusionment, "Alex" has no courage for inner battles, no room for a different view of himself. Just an outer path whose destination feels certain from the start, and, frankly, would have made a more interesting and challenging film told from that perspective: intentional suicide.

Unfortunately this character does feel all too familiar- a person who attempts to google-away his faults, ignorance, and anxieties, coming up with pedigreed cliches that obviate real scrutiny. He is more un-born than wise, trusting in all the wrong places. His fate is accidental. If this was the intended focus of the film it was unclear, and unclearly represented.

The film itself has a shocking and ethically questionable moment when a scene includes a real-life aged eccentric desert artist recluse who does not appear to entirely understand that he is talking to Movie Stars in a Hollywood Film. From a directorial and aesthetic standpoint it is also a terrible mistake to include this footage. First, it contradicts the film's reductive equation of movement with journey, especially odious in a condescending sermon improbably directed at Holbrook's old veteran to get out and see the world. Much worse, however, the scene takes the viewer out of the point of view of the rest of the film, that instantly becomes even thinner, make-believe next to the raw vitality of a true voyager.