| Tuesday, October 2, 2007 |
11:30 - Short books and long movies
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Into the Wild is indeed everything it's cracked up to be. Great piece of filmmaking.
It's so true to the book, in fact, that I don't even know if it's necessary to admonish potential moviegoers to read it first. Hardly anything in the book didn't make it to the screen, other than author Krakauer's personal digression into his own journey up a mountain in the Alaska Coast Ranges and a few bits of narrative color that I missed (such as McCandless' crappy old Datsun being salvaged by rangers and put back into service as a drug interdiction vehicle for years afterwards). But then, it's not a long book to begin with.
Indeed, I'd say that texturally, this film has a lot in common with Brokeback Mountain, another three-hour extrapolation from only a handful of pages. It's amazing what you can do with the film medium to elevate it above the mere landscape of words, when you've got the whole visual canvas of a place like Alaska or the Rockies to do it in, and some haunting acoustic guitar music to set the atmosphere and the pace of it. (The Eddie Vedder soundtrack in Into the Wild did kinda grate on me, but I guess that's what you get when Sean Penn makes a movie.) What might take up a couple of descriptive sentences in a thin paperback book, the pictures they paint limited to what your imagination and Google Earth can piece together, a movie like this one can turn into five minutes of some of the most breathtaking audiovisual storytelling footage you've ever seen. Especially when it's stuff the book never even touched on, or could, like the super-slow-mo shot of Chris tossing his head back and forth in the stream from his improvised shower.
Maybe movies like this are all of a kind, in that they lean so heavily on the atmosphere created by the natural cinematography and the music and the winning, wide-eyed smiles of their protagonists that you can't help but take stock of your own life as you drive home from the theater. I can tell you right now, with only a little bit of embarrassment, that seeing Brokeback Mountain back around February really smacked me upside the head in a number of ways, such that my life since then has been kicked onto a new set of more-or-less parallel rails—perhaps smoother ones, perhaps not, but certainly aimed in a more interesting direction. Never mind that there's not more than thirty pages of narrative behind that screenplay, just as there's probably barely a hundred in Into the Wild. That doesn't matter when the jump to celluloid has been effected so eloquently. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if Into the Wild ends up hoisting a lot of people out of self-dug ruts, whether about travel, career, friendship, self-improvement, or family.
It's an evening well spent, by any standard. Sure, Chris is hardly the kind of "hero" you're forced to like, commiserate with, or justify. As jarring as is the beating he receives at the hands of a railroad cop, you find yourself thinking that dammit all, he deserved it. He left a trail of heartbreak mixed into the life-changing impressions he made on people like Ron Franz and Jan and Rainey, and whether the Danish sunbathers at Lake Mead and the Slab City girlfriend that Penn added to the story are echoes of accurate encounters that never made it into Krakauer's book or not, they flesh out Chris' character by reiterating the kinds of relationships he inadvertently forged, the kinds of twisted and confused faces he left staring after him wherever he went.
That includes all of us sitting in the theater, too. When the credits roll, we all wonder what he—or we—could have done differently, or should have. Anything? Nothing? Probably nothing. Stories like this have to end the way they do in order to have the impact they make on us as a culture. Just as Brokeback Mountain wouldn't have riven me to the core as it did without its dose of pointless death, Chris' story wouldn't have captured more than a local headline or two if he had indeed made it out alive, had found the bucket-and-cable transit system half a mile down the Teklanika, had given himself a shave and a haircut and a new set of clothes and gone trotting up his front driveway like he did in his final illusion. As it is, though, complete with his poetic death—and even the poetic unfairness of the mere few days before he would have been found, revived, and airlifted out—it's turned into a cultural phenomenon that will last for decades in the public consciousness.
Don't let Sean Penn's presence spook you off this one. This movie is apolitical, being a purely character-driven tale, just like the book was. McCandless was no "hippie"; even the hippies he fell in with found him enigmatic. He defied categorization. His stated enemies were liars, hypocrites, and the disloyal and shallow; unstated, he opposed only himself, his only allies an army of long-dead authors. His battle wasn't with any social ill, any political philosophy, any injustice that forced him onto his path as the only choice before him. His choice was his own to make, with a million other paths he could have taken on a whim. He had all the freedom he wanted right at the outset. It was only his final mission into self-denial that finally robbed that freedom from him. We can consider ourselves fortunate that he was kind enough to write down enough of what he discovered on the way there that we could, through Krakauer and Penn, piece together the escape route he found from his mental and physical trap, even if he was never able to actually take that route and save himself. What's important is that through his grand experiment, he rediscovered the meaning of life—happiness shared—which, to us, is something we all but take for granted.
Against all the odds, his findings have now been published, through mechanisms no less heroic and poetic than the story his chroniclers tell. Thoreau should have been so lucky.
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Brian Tiemann
