Captain Fantastic

Matt Ross’s film follows Ben, raising six children in the forest on a curriculum of his own, until their mother’s death forces the family into the city. Ross wrote it out of questions about his own parenting and had partly grown up in alternative living communities. Before the shoot the cast spent two weeks at a wilderness survival camp in Washington. The children learned to build shelter, make fire and find edible plants, slept a night outdoors, and went to a climbing gym daily. The teenage actresses took a class in butchering sheep because they dress a deer on screen. Mortensen slept in the teepee and they called him Summer Dad. What that buys is competence rather than an editing trick: the cast can actually do these things. Ross storyboarded only three sequences, the climb, the rooftop and the deer hunt. Shooting happened in summer 2014, two years after the script was finished, the wait largely down to Mortensen’s schedule. It took the Un Certain Regard directing prize at Cannes and returned twenty one million dollars worldwide on a five million budget. A good fit if it matters to you that the family’s skills were learned rather than faked in the cutting room. Not for anyone who wants the opening hunt and the skinning kept off camera.