Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) burns his money, abandons his worldly possessions and takes up the life of a drifter in Into the Wild, the latest directorial effort from actor Sean Penn

Into the Wild

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A young man, recently graduated from college with grades that could get him into an Ivy League law school, burns his money, gives away his savings, abandons his car, destroys his ID and hits the road to live the life of a drifter. He eventually makes his way to Alaska, where he dreams of living off the land in complete solitude. After a few months of living on rice and small game, and sleeping in an abandoned bus, he finds himself stranded and dies of starvation.

So goes the story of Christopher McCandless, a real life “adventurer” who perished in the Alaskan backcountry in 1992. Into the Wild, written, directed and produced by Sean Penn, is an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name, which portrays McCandless as a heroic, Thoreau-reading free spirit with the gumption to follow his dreams. Krakauer’s book (and, in turn, this film) has already turned McCandless into both an icon and an object of pity: the bus he died in has become something of a mecca for romantic hippie types, while others have written him off as a hapless dope who didn’t have the sense to shop for proper supplies before setting off into the wilderness.

Penn is kind to McCandless, but he does call the young man’s motives and methods into question. The first part of the film, which sees Chris (played with a balance of charm and intensity by Emile Hirsch) denouncing his hypocritical parents and spouting off reams of wide-eyed philosophy, isn’t actually that promising. The protagonist is annoying, selfish and generally unfair to parents who are certainly flawed, but nevertheless beside themselves with sorrow over their son’s later disappearance. As the film progresses and Chris endears himself to a series of kindred spirits on the road (most notably a complex middle-aged hippie played by Catherine Keener, a rough farmer played by Vince Vaughn and a lonely older man played by Hal Holbrook), he also endears himself to the audience, and we begin to see him as a brave but very misguided young man.

Penn’s film is beautiful to look at and is filled with silences (and a decent but slightly overbearing soundtrack by Eddie Vedder) that give the audience time to think about Chris’s journey. Penn neither paints McCandless as a visionary or as a fool — he’s just a very young man who made the tragic mistake of learning life’s lessons the hard way. Penn realizes early on what McCandless doesn’t really grasp until the final moments of the film — it’s not philosophy or solitude that makes his life (or this movie) worthwhile. It’s the people he meets and the relationships that he forms along the way.