Into the Wild will break your heart or tick you off

In theaters Friday: 88 Minutes, Forgetting Sarah Marshall
New on DVD: Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lars and the Real Girl, Juno

If you’re like me, Into the Wild will have you screaming at the screen more often than a 13-year-old watching a slasher movie: “Don’t run upstairs, moron!” Though its anti-materialist message is delivered unevenly, star Emile Hirsch’s performance as Christopher McCandless, an Emory grad and rich kid who trades his Harvard future to drift across the country, is so convincing, I was totally gutted by the end of the picture.

The day after graduation McCandless donates $24,000 to OxFam, ditches his car and begins hitchhiking with little more than a backpack, tent and a couple hundred dollars in his pocket. His goal is to reach Alaska, where he can remove all vestiges of modernity and challenge himself to survive alone in the great outdoors. Along the way he camps out with some trailer-park hippies, works at a Midwest farm and buddies up with a widowed serviceman who takes him in as a grandson.

The tragedy is that McCandless is so egotistically focused on his own goal that he fails to see the value in the relationships he forms on the road. At the start of the film he rejects a career (“Careers are a 20th century invention,” he says), but in a lot of ways he makes his Alaskan dream a career goal, and places that above all of his relationships the same way he might have coveted a partnership in a powerful law firm more than any true love if he’d followed his parent’s path.

In a sense the entire film is less about some reconnection with nature, and more about one modern kid’s search for existential meaning. In the end he finds it, of course, in two distinct heartbreaking ways. Through the kind words of the elderly Ron Franz who implores McCandless to make peace with the parents he hasn’t spoken with in two years, saying, “When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you.” And also in the frozen hell of forced solitude when he first admits to feeling lonely, journaling in desperation, “Happiness is only real when shared.” Unfortunately McCandless looked at his rejection of society as his own personal struggle, not realizing that it is everyone’s struggle unanimously. Some simply shrug harder under the weight of it all. McCandless realizes this, but not before it’s too late.

Adapted and directed by Sean Penn, the film is slightly overlong, but gorgeous to see and never once boring. I generally enjoyed the cinematography of Frenchman Eric Gautier, but I found the editing a little choppy. If Penn had subtracted some shots here and there and lingered longer on the ones he kept, the film would have been better and more austere, I think. I would like to see Into the Wild shot in a similar minimalist style to There Will Be Blood. As it is, Penn uses a few too many camera tricks, when more stillness and stylistic consistency would have been nice. But the film has tons to offer: great performances, a wonderful earthy soundtrack from Eddie Vedder (who got robbed of an Oscar nomination), and loads of truth-seeker dialogue for fans of Jack London, Jack Kerouac and Henry David Thoreau to dig into. It’s one of the best films of 2007.

Here are two great trailers for films I’m looking forward to this summer: Tropic Thunder, which looks like Ben Stiller’s spoof of Vietnam dramas (didn’t Max Fischer already do this?) and Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, which looks like it could be the next Pan’s Labyrinth.