Though Sean Penn has the capacity to get some people’s backs up because of a certain perceived self-righteousness, there’s no doubting his commitment as a filmmaker to probing complex moral issues that touch on contemporary concerns. His protagonists tend to be torn, fallible men, outsiders who are prone to obsessive behaviour as they struggle to give meaning to their lives. In previous Penn-directed films, his leads have been caught between responsibility and recklessness (The Indian Runner), revenge and forgiveness (The Crossing Guard), and moral duty and human weakness (The Pledge).
In Into The Wild, Penn returns to these themes in a gripping examination of a modern-day searcher who abandons civilization in a quest for personal truth. But while Penn’s previous works have at times taken themselves a little too seriously, here there’s a welcome lightness of touch and a freewheeling expansiveness that signal a developing ease behind the camera.
Based on the eponymous non-fiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer, Penn’s movie tells the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless (Hirsch), a 22-year-old upper middle class graduate who feels trapped by the greed and hypocrisy he sees in the society around him. Determined to create a new life for himself, he gives his $24,000 college fund to charity, cuts himself off from his family, abandons his car, christens himself ‘Alexander Supertramp’ and hits the road in a journey that culminates in the frozen wilds of Alaska.
In a series of well-observed vignettes, we see him take to the hobo life, hitching and hiking his way through the backwoods of America, jumping trains and working in dead-end jobs, encountering an oddball collection of countercultural drifters on the way.
Kristen Stewart UK 