I've gotta say, I respect this film in a way that I didn't think I would before I saw it - there's something magnificent about the thing, all two and a half hours of it, and there's no doubting how well it's crafted, following the wanderings of the fiercely idealistic Chris McCandless (it's based on a true story; it aspires to be a true story), who finishes college with great prospects and promptly gives all of his savings to charity and breaks off all communication with his family and old life to test himself in the wilds of America, winding up in what seems to him the purest possible embodiment of that ideal - the climax of his wanderings - alone in Alaska, subsisting on whatever he can shoot or forage, encountering a succession of marginal and outsider types en route.
It's a film that deepens as it goes along, in parallel with the deepening of our understanding of (or, at least, perspective on) its central character. I had thought it was going to be something like On the Road crossed with Walden, and this fear was only increased when the opening epigraph (bad news, that, in a film of this kind - an epigraph of any kind, I mean) came from that arch-Romantic Lord Byron, but it turns out to be considerably more complex than that, finally making its point about meaning and happiness explicit just a few minutes before its end.
Like I said, I respect the film, but in the end, I don't really rate it. It's heartfelt, sure, and quite impressive on its own terms (on those terms, I think it needs to be 2 1/2 hours long - to say that it's too long, as I was initially tempted to do, would be to miss the point)...but it didn't move me, and nor did it inspire me to re-evaluate my own life or beliefs, which would be a great example of criticising something for falling short of impossibly high standards, except that, by its very nature, Into the Wild sets itself up to be judged against just such standards...
(w/ Steph, who won the free tickets which were the only reason we went to see it)
