Ron also sees in the young man a lost opportunity and asks if he can adopt him. The action is lovely, the shot exquisite. In another brief moment, my favorite in the film, he leans down toward a seated Jan and tells her he’ll sit with her as long as she wants, rather than join a group for dinner. When Chris suggests patience in dealing with Jan’s grief, Rainey goes so far as to wonder aloud if he might be “Jesus”. While Jan mourns the loss of a child, both she and Rainey provide Chris with the sort of support and encouragement he never found from Walt or Billie. The couple especially seems a model of generosity and openness. While these scenes suggest a rather reductive “explanation” of what drives Chris out and away, they also look forward to the alternative families Chris encounters and helps to form on the road, most explicitly with “aging hippies” Rainey (Brian Dierker) and Jan (Catherine Keener), and the resigned-to-dolor widower Ron (Hal Holbrook).

These tidbits of information are offered up alongside telling emotional particulars, as the two children observe their parents in disarray: they drink and argue, the control-freaky Walt abuses an acquiescent Billie.

Antennae specialists at NASA, Walt and Billie eventually started their own consulting company and grew wealthy. While it’s plain that Chris has little in common with Wayne, their mutual appreciation has seeds in Chris’ complicated rejection of Walt. He is at once exhausted and energized by the physical labor and mostly bemused by Wayne’s conventionally “outlaw” machismo. On a South Dakota farm, he works for Wayne (Vince Vaughn). He tells himself he seeks “ultimate freedom”, and sets off across the US en route to Alaska, working odd jobs and meeting eccentric or otherwise illuminating characters. Chris begins this process, certainly, when he abandons his belongings and donates his small savings ($25,000) to charity, leaves Virginia (where his parents live), and adopts the name “Alexander Supertramp”. The film makes smart use of that record as translated by Krakauer, cutting back and forth in time, embedding stories within one another, and so challenging common notions of subjectivity and identity. He leaves behind a record of his anguish and exultations. His family, smiling contentedly, can’t know that soon Chris will leave them all behind and, 113 days after his departure, be found dead of starvation inside a “magic bus” where he finds shelter in Alaska. While she sits in the audience with their father Walt (William Hurt) and stepmother Billie (Marcia Gay Harden), Chris mounts the stage to accept his diploma, a ritual that pretty much ends the young man’s affiliation with what he considers corrupt civilization. Where his version begins with his entry into the last place he would live, Alaska (“I now walk into the wild”), hers takes us back to Chris’ graduation from Emory University in 1990. The film offers several views of Chris, most prominently his own (in journal entries appearing as text on-screen) and his sister Carine’s (Jena Malone). Underlining their intimate, ineluctable connections, the film renders such familiar ideas in grand landscapes and excruciating details, revealing their strangeness for Christopher Johnson McCandless (Emile Hirsh). Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction bestseller, revisits themes familiar from his previous work as actor and director: loss, grief, and rebellion. S ean Penn has found the film he had to make.

Into the wild