Slowly Going Bald

• Into the Wild is a good film, and a moving one, but in some pretty head-scratching ways.

• I guess it's appropriate that I find myself not quite willing to go along with the emotional premise of an Emile Hirsch movie; my issues with The Girl Next Door have already been documented. Specifically, Into the Wild is a moving film in that it hits the right notes and I allowed myself to be moved a certain degree. But I couldn't commit completely.

• Sean Penn is unquestionably a good director, and he's made a good film, despite weighing it down with awful narration. But by the end of the film, he's shifted from making a film about a boy striking out to find his own way in life to making a tone poem about what it would be like to make a film about that boy. In short, he shifts from storytelling to thinking about storytelling, and as a result, Into the Wild begins as a story about Christopher McCandless (Hirsch) and ends as a movie about Penn's struggle to tell a story about McCandless.

• But my bigger problem has to do with Penn's willingness to celebrate McCandless as some kind of visionary and almost deify a kid who ran off and died for no reason. I was sad but understanding when McCandless' parents turned out to be your typical suburban WASPy assholes. Sure, yes, burn that bridge, walk away. But McCandless clearly loved his sister, and she loved him, and Penn never even took a stab at figuring out why McCandless was moved to sever one of the few ties that could have held him to society. I don't even remember Penn even getting close to implying that no conclusion could be drawn in that area; it just kinda dropped.

• Likewise, I was sad that what in the film was McCandless' soul-altering epiphany — that happiness is only meaningful when it's shared — was something he didn't figure out until he was dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness. I probably knew that idea to be true in essence in high school, and in college I lived through a few things (like everyone does in college) that made me powerfully aware of just how true that idea is. But I didn't have to kill myself in Alaska to realize that, well, friends make life meaningful. This is something most people — popular, lonely, whatever — figure out on their own at some point, and I don't consider McCandless some kind of deified free spirit simply because he got really fit and lived off venison and cried when he realized how much he'd missed out on life. I hurt for him, yes. I wish he'd never come to that end. But I ultimately can't celebrate a film that seems to worship a boy for making such a cataclysmic mistake, the kind that cost him his life, especially when his existential breakthrough is something everyone else accepts much earlier, and easier. McCandless was a lost boy, but in none of the ways Penn showed.