Unfortunately, Into the Wild (2007) does a lot to distance you from the main character who is supposed to hold your attention for 2 and a half hours. Fortunately, however, if you can hang in there, the ending will probably move you.
How does the film distance us from the Chris McCandless, the young college grad who rejects his parents, society, and most people and spends two years travelling to Alaska in search of peace alone with nature? Let us count the ways. First, the camera almost never shows Chris in a face-on close up until the final scene. Chris dodges and glances off us as he does everyone in the movie.
Second, the movie is told in flashbacks. We know he makes it to Alaska, so this leaves each substantial flashback to justify itself. The flashbacks cannot do anything for the plot, but they do slowly develop Chris’s character.
Third, while some of the flashbacks develop character, they don’t tell much of a story in themselves. For example, Chris is earning good money as a hired hand on a farm when his boss is inexplicably arrested by the FBI and, in the next shot, Chris is on the road again. What? Another example: instead of seeing Chris’s exciting journey into Mexico, we hear a summary when a US Immigration Officer asks, “So how’d you get into Mexico?”
Fourth, the film is divided into self-conscious sections labelled as follows: Birth; Adolescence; Adulthood; Family; and Getting of Wisdom.
Fifth, this self-consciousness continues with printing superimposed on the pictures as Chris writes postcards or notes.
Sixth, for no apparent reasons, the screen often splits into two or three.
Seven, the cinematography jumps back and forth from a grainy, jerky docu-drama look to a standard movie look.
Eight, most of our insight into Chris comes not from what he says and does but from the dreaded voice over narration, here provided by his sister.
Although Into the Wild did a lot to distance me from the main character, I found the ending powerfully sad. The movie portrays Chris’s dad as a bastard and his mother as enabling a dysfunctional family. I believe it. But more importantly I believe that how a kid turns out is an interaction between the kid and the parents. So if Chris had been of a different nature, he might have said, Dad, you’re a bastard, thank you for putting me through college and Harvard law school, and I’ll see you once a year at Christmas. But as luck would have it, Chris took it extremely hard: Dad, you’re a bastard, I throw away everything you gave me, I put no faith in anyone, and I disappear. I identify with a young college grad hitting the road to find himself—Chris is simply more extreme than most. I also identify with what happened to him. Finding yourself in your mid-twenties is fraught with danger—sink or swim, do or die, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, etc. As luck would have it, Chris ate a poisonous wild plant and died. While many people emerge from their soul searching adventures battered and humbled, Chris was again extreme.
The last segment of the film wisely abandons the filming techniques that distanced me from Chris. Although the segment is entitled Getting of Wisdom, I found the film all the more powerful for not telling me straight out what Chris was supposed to have learned. Take the last three statements in the movie as Chris lies dieing in a shelter in the Alaskan wilderness. Third last: He says, from reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, that we should call each thing by its right name. He made a mistake mislabelling the plant he ate. He made a mistake calling himself Alexander Supertramp, so he leaves a last note signed with his real name. But this is a bit unfair to the young sojourner. Eating a poisonous plant was a mistake, whereas travelling under an assumed name was, for Chris, a necessary step to becoming more mature. Second last line: Chris writes that happiness is only real when shared. But Chris is writing this under duress—he is dieing alone. Although it sounds as if he has changed his tune, maybe he hasn’t. Final line: Chris imagines himself returning home, his parents running down the sidewalk, everyone hugging, and he wonders: If I came home smiling, would you see what I’m seeing now? And what he is seeing now, with a smile on his face, is the beauty of nature as he dies. I loved the complexity of the ending and wish the preceding two hours had had similar power.