Into the Wild.

"Ladies and gentleman, writer-director Sean Penn did not ruin the story of Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, in his big-screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book, Into the Wild," announces Jim Emerson. "The movie has awkward patches... But Penn's empathy with his driven hero is unmistakable and deeply felt."

For the New York Times, Charles McGrath talks with Penn about his "deeply affecting movie version of the Krakauer book, with cinematography so beautiful it makes the Alaskan landscape seem seductively otherworldy," but not before noting that Krakauer suggests in his book that "McCandless was a hero in the tradition of Jack London and Thoreau: a solitary quester, an explorer of his own interior landscape, in search of a more authentic relation to the natural world. The Krakauer view has prevailed among a small band of pilgrims who over the years have visited the bus and made it an informal shrine."

Updated through 9/24.

"To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "As screenwriter, Penn has done a superb job of giving shape and dimension to characters who passed only fleetingly through Krakauer's pages—the fellow travelers McCandless encountered on his journey and whose lives, in some cases, he irrevocably altered.... Penn also seems more engaged with the language of cinema here than he has in any of his previous directorial efforts (which include the excellent The Pledge and the overwrought The Crossing Guard)."

"For better or worse, Penn sees this saga as kinetic; he attempts to evoke McCandless's restless odyssey by leaping around in time and space," writes David Edelstein in New York. "That means fast montage, lyrical slow motion, fleeting encounters, narration by several different people, lines from the protagonist's letters scrawled across the screen, and magnificent scenery held just long enough to register.... After all the nits are picked, Into the Wild has a crazy integrity—Penn believes. The actor in him understands what McCandless in his journal calls 'the climactic battle to kill the false being within.'"

"It is one of those peculiarly American odysseys, with echoes of Huck Finn, Woody Guthrie, Kerouac and Easy Rider, in which the true heart of America is found still beating among its drifters and outcasts," writes Nick Roddick in the Evening Standard. "But the film, like the book, also speaks to a younger generation, for whom the word 'career' is more threat than aspiration."

"Krakauer's novel held McCandless in esteem but not with the rose-tinted glasses through which Penn views him, as the director casts his protagonist as a veritable Christ figure to be not only revered but envied," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

"I walked into the film knowing nothing about the book, not even if it was fiction or nonfiction," blogs Sean Axmaker for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "The film certainly has the feel of a memoir, but it (like, I assume, the book) is much more: an odyssey, an escape, a personal journey, and an experience both exhilarating and devastating."

"It features zooms, split screens, jump cuts, and a song score by a growling Eddie Vedder that wouldn't feel at all out of place on 70s radio," notes Bryant Frazer. "Cinematographer Éric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Clean, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) favors long lenses here, the kind that can isolate one subject twixt foreground and background and then, dramatically changing their plane of focus, seek out another. They emphasizes the distances involved in the open spaces where much of the film takes place, and their voyeuristic qualities echo the book's theme of observation across a temporal distance."

Tom Charity, reporting from Toronto for CNN, found Into the Wild "maybe the best surprise of the festival."

"[T]he wonderful thing about Penn's Into the Wild is that it dramatizes McCandless' cross-country journey so artfully, and with such specificity, that viewers can take away from it whatever they want," suggests Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"Penn has the directorial chops to extract low-key performances that percolate rather than boil (notably, Jack Nicholson in The Crossing Guard and The Pledge)," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "But the laid-back SoCal vibe emitted here by lead actor Emile Hirsch (who played skate god Jay Adams in Lords of Dogtown) only thickens the fog surrounding his character's motivations.... We're left with little understanding of what nature had to offer McCandless other than a void."

Hillary Frey profiles Hirsch in the New York Observer.

Updates, 9/20: Joe Donnelly talks with Penn for a longish LA Weekly cover story. Also, Ella Taylor: "Honestly, I'd rather be talking to [Catherine] Keener about her more muscular roles, like The Ballad of Jack and Rose (in which she also plays a hippie, but with a more feckless edge), or her dryly sardonic turn as Harper Lee in Capote, or just about anything she's done for Nicole Holofcener."

"The terrains change from lush greens and browns to the blank white of winter as he grows disillusioned by loneliness," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The Alaskan setting isn't the only reason why Into the Wild should be considered alongside Fessenden's horror flick. Both stories illuminate the travails of a world far stronger and insurmountable than its notoriously ambivalent inhabitants care to admit."

"Even though the movie is packed with familiar faces, Penn's ability to draw previously unseen facets from his cast makes for one revelation after another," notes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"There are a few too many overly sincere attempts at profundity (the movie opens with a Lord Byron quote), but Penn's insight into his subject's core desire - his need for 'ultimate freedom' and a desire 'to kill the false being within' - propels the film past its flaws," writes Matt Singer at the Reeler.

Updates, 9/21: "Mr Penn, even more than Mr Krakauer, takes the Emersonian dimension of Chris McCandless's project seriously, even as he understands the peril implicit in too close an identification with nature," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The book took pains to defend its young protagonist against the suspicion that he was suicidal, unbalanced or an incompetent outdoorsman, gathering testimony from friends he had made in his last years as evidence of his kindness, his care and his integrity. The film, at some risk of sentimentalizing its hero, goes further, pushing him to the very brink of sainthood." Still, Into the Wild is "alive to the mysteries and difficulties of experience in a way that very few recent American movies have been."

"Too much of Into the Wild is reminiscent of, as Alice Cooper once put it, those songs about how good water tastes," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But if you strip some of that dewy-eyed nature worship from Into the Wild, it becomes clear that Penn cares deeply about presenting this spoiled, privileged, misguided kid as someone we should care about.... In fact, all through the movie, Chris - supposedly interested more in souls and people than in money - seems not just detached from life but disinterested in it. Detachment, at least, can be active as well as passive. Disinterest is just boring."

"It's [Penn's] warmest, most celebratory and most completely realized film and, though you might not guess it from the material, it is also arguably his most personal," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Tempting as it might be to dismiss McCandless as a hare-brained hippie, he's not so easily reduced, and Penn does well to honor his slippery nature, even as he's clearly awed by his grand adventure," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"Hero or asshole, McCandless has a story worth watching," writes John Constantine at Nerve.

"I happen to think Sean Penn is one of our more admirable knotheads - a fearless actor, a bold controversialist and, as he proved with The Pledge, a very strong director, capable of far subtler moral complexity than Into the Wild affords," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "I think the central mistake of this film derives from its lack of irony, a sense it refuses to impart that the world may not be exactly as the zealous Christopher perceives it to be. The film needs at least to entertain the possibility that its protagonist was driven less by high principle than by lamentable screwiness. And we need to leave it carrying some sense of tragic consequence with us. Instead, we're simply glad to be finished, at last, with this annoying man-child."

"Perhaps the best indication of the film's richness and maturity is that one's appreciation of it isn't predicated on whether McCandless is perceived as a holy naif or a callow backpacker," writes Elbert Ventura at Reverse Shot.

"Penn performs one bit of sleight-of-hand on the book that's borderline unforgivable," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "It's a Lifetime TV rule that this movie should have risen above: Every questionable moral action must be explained by an equal and opposite childhood trauma."

Update, 9/22: Gina Piccalo talks with Hirsch for the LAT.

Update, 9/24: Anne Thompson's attended the LA premiere.

Posted by dwhudson at September 19, 2007 6:30 AM