Walt and Billie intend to continue to search for Chris until they know conclusively what has happened to him. Chris' Datsun is eventually discovered abandoned in the Arizona desert, the authorities believing it being done on purpose as opposed to Chris being abducted. Walt, Billie and Carine will learn by the end of the summer that Chris had no intention of going to Harvard as he has since moved from his apartment in Atlanta without a word to them, he arranging with the post office to hold his mail for a couple of months before being "returned to sender" to give him a head start in his escape from his family. Before his parents and sister head home to Virginia following the convocation, Chris, refusing his parents' gift of a new car to replace his old Datsun which he states works perfectly fine, tells them that he has thoughts of going into Harvard Law, he having received excellent grades in what were largely classes focusing on global social consciousness. Watching him get his degree are his wealthy parents, Walt McCandless and Billie McCandless, and his teenaged sister, Carine McCandless. I grew up with him.In the spring of 1990, Christopher McCandless obtains his undergraduate degree from Emory. I believe in Sean Penn's Christopher McCandless. From a nice little house surrounded by evergreens at the other end of Washington Street, he left to look for something he needed to find. His body was later identified as a dead Sandinista freedom fighter. Sometimes he came home and his mother would have to sew $100 bills into the seams of his blue jeans. He never made a break from his parents, but they rarely knew where he was. His bedroom was filled with aquariums, terrariums, snakes, hamsters, spiders, and butterfly and beetle collections. I grew up in Urbana three houses down from the Sanderson family - Milton and Virginia and their boys Steve and Joe. It is a testament like the words that Christopher carved into planks in the wilderness. The movie is so good partly because it means so much, I think, to its writer-director. Sean Penn himself fiercely idealistic, uncompromising, a little less angry now, must have read the book and reflected that there, but for the grace of God, went he. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up eventually in a bus of one kind or another. Two of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of strangers. This is a reflective, regretful, serious film about a young man swept away by his uncompromising choices. It is great acting, and more than acting. Emile Hirsch plays him in a hypnotic performance, turning skeletal, his eyes sinking into his skull while they still burn with zeal. From his journals and other evidence, Penn reconstructs his final weeks. He lives off the land, but the land is a zero-tolerance system. He finds an abandoned bus where no bus should be and makes it his home. Ron tries, before he admits he is no longer in condition.Īnd then McCandless disappears from the maps of memory, into unforgiving Alaska. Christopher lectures this man, who has seen it all, on what he is missing and asks him to follow him up a steep hillside to see the next horizon. The most touching contact he makes is with Ron ( Hal Holbrook), an older man who sees him clearly and with apprehension, and begins to think of him as a wayward grandson. He meets such people as Rainey and Jan (Brian Dieker and Catherine Keener), leftover hippies still happily rejecting society, and Wayne ( Vince Vaughn), a hard-drinking, friendly farmer. These are people who take in the odd youth, feed him, shelter him, give him clothes, share their lives, mentor him and worry as he leaves to continue his quest, which seems to them, correctly, as doomed.īy now McCandless has renamed himself Alexander Supertramp. It was an impressive reporting achievement to track them down, and Penn's film affectionately embodies them in strong performances. In the book, Krakauer traces his movements through the memories of people he encounters on his journey. He sees himself not as homeless, but as a man freed from homes. In centuries past such men might have been saints, retreating to a cave or hidden hermitage, denying themselves all pleasures except subsistence. He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of nature. Why did he disappear from their lives, why was his car found abandoned, where was he, and why, why, why? He had good grades at Emory his future in law school was right there in his grasp. We meet Christopher ( Emile Hirsch) as an idealistic dreamer, in reaction against his proud parents ( William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and his bewildered sister ( Jena Malone). Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source.
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