The lay of the land

Into the Wild is an absorbing depiction of America's ultimate drop-out, writes Michael Dwyer

EARLY in his career, Marlon Brando played Johnny, the sullen biker of The Wild One (1954). Asked what he is rebelling against, Johnny answers with the question, "What have you got?" Into the Wild invokes that succinct dialogue exchange - along with the bikers in Easy Rider who, as the poster put it, "went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere" - as we ponder the mindset of the new film's protagonist, Christopher McCandless.

Based on fact (and, to an extent, speculation), Into the Wild explores what impelled McCandless to take the extreme course of action he chose when he embarked on a hazardous odyssey in 1992. As written and directed by Sean Penn, the film portrays McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) as the ultimate dropout from society on a quest for utopian simplicity.

At the age of 22, he abandons his plans to study law at Harvard and donates his substantial college fund to Oxfam America. He destroys all forms of identification and changes his name to Alexander Supertramp, and he heads north to Alaska.

"I now walk into the wild," McCandless proudly declares in his journals, which, along with Jon Krakauer's book, serve as the basis for Penn's screenplay.

As is de rigeuer for the road movie genre, McCandless has diverse encounters along the way - with a post-hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), a jovially feckless farm worker (Vince Vaughn), a teenage singer (Kristen Stewart), and, in the most touching scenes, a lonely retired army veteran (beautifully played by Hal Holbrook).

That McCandless finally remains an enigma does not imply a negative criticism of the Penn's absorbing film, which scatters more than enough clues for us to decipher him for ourselves. Some of these are obvious.

McCandless shares the view Philip Larkin expressed when he wrote: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do." Alienated from his feuding parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), McCandless reacts against them and the solidly middle-class background they've given him by rejecting the materialism of the modern world.

The film, and McCandless, are more complex than that, and it draws him as a complicated character - naive, self-absorbed, impetuous, uncompromising, and so reckless and ill-prepared for his self-described "aesthetic adventure" that it raises the question of whether or not he was suicidal.

Hirsch, a young actor quite impressive in minor movies such as Alpha Dog and Lords of Dogtown, rises to the challenge of the role, immersing himself deep inside the character and in his personal and physical transformation. On screen throughout the film, Hirsch portrays McCandless with an engaging blend of determination and vulnerability in a committed performance for which he clearly did most, and perhaps all, of his own stunts.

Into the Wild is Penn's fourth film as a director (after The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard and The Pledge) and, by some way, his most adventurous and accomplished. He evidently empathises with his protagonist's disaffection to the point of romanticising him, yet pulls away time and again to consider the full implications of his actions.

Penn's leisurely telling of the story sets a perfect rhythm as his contemplative and characteristically intense movie moves back and forward in time, drawing on the McCandless journals in voiceover and in large, handwritten on-screen quotations; on the reflections of his sister (Jena Malone); and on Eddie Vedder's sturdy songs that serve to advance the narrative.

Visually, Into the Wild is an outstanding achievement, and its striking, changing landscapes are indelibly captured by French cinematographer Eric Gautier, whose cameras followed another young idealist (Che Guevara) in The Motorcycle Diaries, another road movie of self-discovery .