Into the Wild

A road film adapted from a real life. Christopher finishes university. His parents want to buy him a car; he sends the twenty-four thousand dollars in his account to a charity, burns his identity documents, abandons his car and walks. He tells nobody. His family does not know where he is for months and his sister becomes the voice of the narrative. From there the film is a series of stops. A grain elevator, a river, a community in California, a couple living on the road, a girl and an old man. At each stop someone asks him to stay and he leaves. The destination is Alaska. He settles into an abandoned bus for the winter and tries to live by hunting. What the narrative is interested in is not nature but refusal: Christopher is running from society, from money and from his family, and the film shows this with both admiration and criticism. The sentence at the end is where the narrative corrects itself. He writes something in the margin of a book, and that sentence is the answer to the whole journey. The section with the old man is the best part of the film and the role brought an Academy Award nomination. The source is Jon Krakauer's book; he had researched the case as a magazine article. The music is largely by Eddie Vedder and was written for the film. The bus in the film was real and was visited for years like a pilgrimage site; as the number of visitors needing rescue grew, the authorities removed it from the area by helicopter in 2020. Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Marcia Gay Harden and Kristen Stewart are in the cast. Sean Penn directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes long, quiet road films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a narrative that questions its subject; the film sometimes elevates him too far, which was criticised.