The Savages

2007 // USA // Tamara Jenkins // January 3, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - The Savages is, if nothing else, unequivocal in its subject matter. It tackles the admittedly tricky topic of elderly dementia with gusto, exhibiting fearless interest in how such a tragedy can act as a catalyst and a stressor on toxic familial dynamics. The route it takes to this destination is muddled, however. Tamara Jenkins aspires for her second feature film to be both funny and touching, and to that end she traffics simultaneously in affected oddness, excruciating awkwardness, and legitimate human pain. The mixture never quite coagulates into anything particularly revelatory or even into lasting amusement. It's a credit to Jenkins' sharp dialog and the talent of her lead performers, therefore, that The Savages manages to find some absorbing drama in the deepest corners of the black comedy coal bin.

Laura Linney is Wendy Savage, a middle-age office temp and wannabe playwright. Linney has a somewhat inflexible approach to her acting, but she's always mesmerizing to watch, and no less so in The Savages. Wendy is probably the most repulsive character she has ever played, and it's a harsh spectacle to witness, given that age has bestowed me with a tendency for celebrity crushes on older, skillful actresses like Linney. Wendy lies compulsively, often to elicit envy or pity. She steals stacks of office supplies from work, sleeps with a married man, and self-consciously frets that her unproduced plays are too whiny and indulgent. She also clearly hates herself.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is Jon Savage, Wendy's older brother and a professor of drama. Less repugnant but more pathetic than his sibling, Jon is trapped in author's purgatory with an unfinished Bertolt Brecht book looming over him. Hoffman approaches the role with his now-familiar naturalistic style. As the rumpled Jon, he is full of mumbles, long sighs, and thousand-yard stares. He seems to have a significant intellect, but he's so damn lethargic, any scruffy endearment he might have had has long been strangled. He can't even work up the fortitude to marry his Polish girlfriend, despite the fact that her departure—due to an expiring visa—causes him obvious agony.

Given these middle-aged middle-class losers, wouldn't you know there's an unpleasant family history? Wendy and Jon rarely speak to each other, and they never speak to their father, Lenny, now living in Arizona with his ailing girlfriend. When the elder Savage begins descending into dementia, the brother and sister must retrieve him and find him a nursing home. Philip Bosco plays Lenny with alternating volcanic agitation and forlorn distraction, a believable performance that somehow maintains the focus on Wendy and Jon. And, indeed, The Savages is less about Lenny than about how his condition scratches his children's scars until they are raw and bleeding.

Jenkins approaches the drama of these uncomfortable circumstances with admirably stifling realism. She doesn't shy away from the sheer terrible fact of dementia, and she has a good sense for the wretched, absurd nature of its effects. I lost each of my grandfathers to Alzheimer's disease and a Parkinson-plus syndrome, respectively, and The Savages' bleakness struck me as painfully authentic. In one of the film's darkest, slickest moments, Hoffman launches into an arrogant, screaming monologue about the nursing home industry's predatory aim to distract clients from the "horror-show" of aging with group activities and landscaping. Indeed.

Where The Savages falters is in its attempts to inject levity by means of deliberate eccentricity. This tactic is not inherently flawed. Juno, to offer a counterexample, employs slanted characterization and production design to great effect, blending them into an attractive and neatly executed comic whole. In contrast, Jenkins dribbles goofy details into The Savages without much consequence or sense. When Wendy and Jon arrive in Arizona to fetch their father, they inexplicably bring a gaudy, heart-shaped Mylar balloon. Nothing in Wendy or Jon's character suggests this dash of kitsch. Its presence seems due to Jenkins' desire to giggle at the indignity in husky, sulky Hoffman holding onto it. A similar dynamic plagues the broader narrative. When Lenny selects a racist silent film for movie night at his overwhelmingly black-staffed nursing home, the results are awkward, but also flimsy. The scene is unmoored from the rest of the film, and not particularly funny.

The Savages is at its wittiest when the ugliness of Lenny's condition or Wendy and Jon's personalities becomes so pronounced that the film ventures into farce. In other words, its funniest scenes are those that are the least deliberately funny. There's a weird, visceral thrill in watching two gifted actors like Linney and Hoffman bicker, and some intriguing themes ooze through their characters' neuroses. I don't know that the film will hold up well on a second viewing, but Jenkins' script is at its strongest in these moments, suggesting that a superior The Savages might lie in a two-person stage play.

There's enough gleam in the best features of The Savages to recommend it, particularly if you like your comedy pitch-black. It's an acidic pleasure to see Linney and Hoffman play characters like Wendy and Jon, and Jenkins is adept at crafting dialogue and subtly tugging her performers in the right directions. Unfortunately, she cobbles The Savages together without much discipline or significance, such that the result is ultimately aimless. That's a shame. The Savages has an unsentimental view of aging and family that, unlike many comedies about damaged people and awful events, is both caustic and genuine.

Gone Baby Gone

2007 // USA // Ben Affleck // December 27, 2007 // Theatrical Print

B - In a year that gave us Zodiac, I almost feel bad for other crime thrillers. David Fincher's masterpiece is a hard act to follow. Despite the long shadow over the genre in 2007, however, Gone Baby Gone stands as a remarkably effective work, shot through with flashes of genuine virtuosity. It's a sleek slice of noir filmmaking that showcases the flowering talent of Casey Affleck and a captivating, blistered performance from Amy Ryan. Just as interesting is what the film portends for the future work of its director, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who does a bit of acting on the side. You may have heard of him? Ben Affleck?

Set in the multi-ethnic working-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, Gone Baby Gone chronicles the efforts of young private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, hired to search for Amanda McCready, a missing four-year-old girl. Kenzie and Gennaro are a far cry from the hardboiled gumshoes of a previous era. Skinny local kids, they've built a middle class life in a shabby, crime-plagued urban neighborhood by finding people that the police can't—or won't—find. Kenzie is a deceptively confident and upright guy, but he lives in a shadowy territory where his drug dealer contacts sometimes request his assistance on questionable errands. Gennaro is Kenzie's backup, not quite his equal in their dangerous line of work, but capable of selfless fortitude when it is required of her. Their effectiveness as investigators is rooted in their familiarity and attachment to their neighborhood, but their reputation as local do-gooders has its drawbacks.

Casey Affleck shines for the second time this year, bringing sensitivity and credibility to Kenzie from unlikely angles. It's nothing close to his career-defining turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but his presence is a haunted, sharply outlined upgrade to nearly every scene. Amy Ryan is sweeping year-end awards left and right for her portrayal of Amanda's mother Helene, a broken, repulsive woman, full of juvenile defiance. I haven't seen many reviewers note the commendable physicality of Ryan's performance, which is entirely believable and never garish. She disappears into the role, but credit is also due to the wonderfully written part itself, which forgoes abrupt character turns for moments of authentic revelation. The casting of Morgan Freeman has lately become a lazy shortcut to paternal credibility. It's therefore a small pleasure to see his police captain evolve into a more complicated character as the film plays out.

Gone Baby Gone is one of five novels by Dorchester native Dennis Lehane that feature Kenzie and Gennaro. In terms of its story and structure, the film is fairly unremarkable, and in more mercenary hands it might have dipped into outright banality. Granted, what Lehane's tale does well, it does extraordinarily well. Namely, it utilizes the ambiguous, gritty conventions of hardboiled fiction to grapple with the place of children in America's urban wastelands (both material and moral). It's a shame, then, that those same conventions drag Gone Baby Gone down in places, rendering it inert whenever the filmmakers and performers go through the obligatory crime drama motions. The truth becomes extremely convoluted as the film progresses. It marches through successive tiers of exposition and flashbacks that border on tiresome in order to reach its resolution. Fortunately, that resolution is ultimately satisfying and vital to Gone Baby Gone's thrust.

First time director Ben Affleck exhibits a steady and oddly seasoned hand in realizing the cruel themes and clear sense of place from the source material. The native Affleck has obvious affection for blue-collar Boston, warts and all, and he focuses his sentimentality to good effect here. It finds resonance in Gone Baby Gone's fascination with locality and its entangling effect on devotion and responsibility. Affleck displays a modest, performer-centered style that echoes that most un-auteur of American auteurs, Clint Eastwood. Affleck is keenly aware that he is sketching a grubby moral rumination. While his private eye protagonists are endangered, often dizzyingly so, he skillfully focuses the tension on Amanda's fate and the nagging ache of unresolved mystery, rather than on Kenzie and Gennaro themselves. Gone Baby Gone's cinematographer and frequent Cameron Crowe collaborator John Toll has some duds on his record, but his bragging rights include visual triumphs such as The Last Samurai and The Thin Red Line. In Gone Baby Gone, Toll blends the tenebrous, greasy-gothic qualities of Fincher with the Michael Mann's cool, pitiless eye for urban landscapes.

The admirable performances and Ben Affleck's confident direction elevate Gone Baby Gone above rote crime drama strictures. It's a refreshing inaugural accomplishment from Affleck, and a tantalizing peek at his talent for empathetic and vigorous storytelling.

Juno

2007 //  USA // Jason Reitman // December 26, 2007 // Theatrical Print

A - What to make of Juno? The second comedy this year about unplanned pregnancy, Juno aims for a far trickier target than does its fratboy cousin, Knocked Up. Judd Apatow's film was elevated by its perceptive and sensitive script, even as it coaxed forth conventional belly-laughs. Director Jason Reitman takes a riskier and altogether different track with Juno, plunging headfirst into a screenplay so densely packed with verbal acrobatics and hipster lingo that it risks unintentional self-parody. It might have, that is, if Diablo Cody's script hadn't also delivered such startling sucker-punches of genuine humanity, if the actors weren't one of the best comedic ensemble casts I've seen in years, and if Reitman hadn't brought it all together with such graceful efficiency and engrossing whimsy.

The comedy in Juno is of an unusual breed, more likely to elicit guffaws and gape-mouthed smiles of disbelief than hearty laughter. The dialogue comes very fast and brimming with puns and slang, forgoing realism for pure linguistic spectacle. To dub it "quirky" seems a woeful understatement and an abuse of the term. Juno's characters have neither the sedate quality of Wes Anderson's playthings nor the gawky nerd-chic of Napoleon Dynamite and its imitators. They are closer kin to Ghost World's Enid, although unlike Clowes' heroine, Juno MacGuff fortunately has a circle of friends and relatives who appreciate her and share her wry outlook. While Juno's dialogue is undeniably amusing to absorb, such self-aware, brainy cuteness might have grown irritating after an hour and a half. Fortunately, Juno has so much going for it that its sins of excess on this count recede, becoming just another facet of its remarkable personality.

In her biographical details, sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff is an improbable, even fantastical, creature. She possesses the intellect, wit, and tastes of a woman twice her age, declaring her adoration for the music of Patti Smith and the films of Dario Argento. She wields a hefty dose of prickly wit, but as a character she is ultimately so good-natured and industrious that it's a hard not to fall in love with her. Following a bored Saturday night that culminates in sex with her best friend, Paulie, Juno finds herself pregnant. Turned off by an impersonal, grubby abortion clinic, she elects to give the impending baby to a childless couple. Despite her fierce mind, Juno is still emotionally immature and woefully naive. She imagines handing over the child after nine months, and everything returning to normal afterwards.

Of course, nothing turns out as predicted, for Juno or the audience. It's so easy to get lost in the razzle-dazzle of Cody's dialogue that her original, moving take on this well-tread melodrama sneaks up on you. Indeed, she may be counting on this. For all its Vaudeville punchiness, the joys of Juno lie in the unconventional and powerful places its characters take us. Juno's parents are middle-class, middle-aged goofballs, but their family crisis reveals strength of character and experiential wisdom that Juno never anticipated. Vanessa and Mark, the wealthy couple that Juno chooses to parent her offspring, are initially utilized for humor—her via her yuppie perfectionism, him via his man-child misery. Yet perhaps more than any other characters, they travel along unexpected trajectories as the story unfolds. With the adoptive parents in the wings, the forthcoming infant is not a catastrophe for Juno and Paulie, but the fact of the pregnancy sets their relationship on a tipping point.

Reitman exhibits a smart, limber direction; as an example of comedic storytelling, Juno is essentially perfect. Nothing feels out of place, and every scene serves to move the narrative along at pace that feels simultaneously measured and completely natural. This is all too rare a thing in modern comedies, which often unwisely stretch the half-hour sitcom blueprint into a feature length film. Reitman employs a production design that is intensely textured and one degree off from naturalistic. There is enough realism to convince, but enough odd detail to captivate. Juno's home, for example, has a cluttered, lived-in quality, with minutiae that unobtrusively match her family's history and Midwestern character.

Much of Juno's appeal lies in its uniformly strong cast. Ellen Page, liberated from the moral thorns that studded Hard Candy, shines with playfulness and geek-girl sexuality as Juno. Given that she does it so well, Page could have confined her performance to ninety minutes of smirking sarcasm. Instead she infuses Juno with lively sparks and vulnerable teen angst that, while familiar, are utterly believable. As Paulie, Michael Cera brings the same sublime, muttering discomfort he showcased in Superbad, but with a bit more sweetness. Cera is skilled at conjuring the awkwardness and beauty of adolescence, but I'm nevertheless eager to see him develop further as a comedic actor. The list of engaging performances goes on an on: Olivia Thirlby as Juno's enthusiastic, loyal friend Leah; J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney as the bewildered, protective father and stepmother; Jason Bateman as Mark, striking notes of childish aimlessness, college-boyfriend charm, and unseemly attraction; and a completely astonishing Jennifer Garner as Vanessa, who enters the film as a Stepford kill-joy and evolves into its most sympathetic character.

To me, it seems that the widespread critical fascination with Juno's quips and eccentric turns of phrase misses the mark. The snap and crackle of its funky wit is its most noticeable feature, but also its most trifling. Like the bountiful crop of freckles on the beautiful girl next door, Juno's sardonic sensibility might be distracting to some suitors. Good riddance, I say. Juno perfectly executes the parameters of a family comedy for the twenty-first century, and then transcends them. She's sweet, soft, and smart, and she'll still be your best friend in the morning.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2007 // USA - UK // Tim Burton // December 21, 2007 // Theatrical Print

B - Two disclaimers: First, I had never seen Steven Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on the stage, although the story was familiar to me. Second, I am not generally a fan of musicals, whether live or on film. With these facts in mind, I found Tim Burton's film adaptation of Sondheim's musical to be the director's most thoughtful, magnetic work since his superb 1990 gothic-suburban fable Edwards Scissorhands. Whether Burton deserves the credit for the achievement of this new Sweeney Todd is debatable. The wide adoration lavished upon Sondheim's musical—from undiscriminating Broadway tourists and devotees of American music history alike—suggests that much of the film's depth is a product of the source material. What Burton doubtlessly brings to the tale is his studied eye for sumptuous, gloomy detail and the bittersweet poignancy he coaxes from his performers. Sweeney Todd is, admittedly, heavy on the bitter, and mostly bereft of sweet. It serves up a vision of human behavior that is easily the most brutal and bleak that Burton has ever dabbled in.

The story is now familiar territory in the American cultural landscape. What Burton and screenwriter John Logan bring to the tale is a repulsive intimacy that would be extremely challenging to achieve on the stage. Burton keeps the focus on Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett, although he tugs the dreams and desires of all the principal characters into a knot of grimy despair. There is no chorus in the film, and the populace of its Dickensian England is more of a setting than a cast. The stifling, sooty, (barely) exaggerated horror of Sweeney's London renders the gruesome violence of the tale all the more believable. The lush Hammer Horror set pieces that lent Sleepy Hollow its patina of moldering nightmare have been toned down half a notch here, to masterful effect. For the first time in a long time, Burton achieves a remarkable resonance between story and setting.

It's hard for me to judge musical numbers, given that I find the whole notion of singing actors to be distracting in film. It takes me about ten minutes for me to settle in and accept the affected reality of musicals, where characters readily burst into song. Perhaps due to Burton's familiar visual style—for which I have deep admiration and affection, if not always for its application—I found this transition easier to achieve in Sweeney Todd. The film has moments of positively operatic ferocity, but most of the music is relatively reserved. Some numbers are sung in solitude, plaintive declarations directed at the greasy London sky. Some songs are murmurings or matter-of-fact commentary directed to other characters, who are alternately oblivious or sprinkling in their own wordplay. I wouldn't characterize any of the music as remarkably infectious, but it has a magnificent personality all its own. Sondheim's lyrics are works of undeniable wit and density, with whiffs of Lewis Carroll and Tom Stoppard. For his part, Burton's staging of the numbers is often quite memorable, particularly for "The Worst Pies in London," "Epiphany," "A Little Priest," and "By the Sea".

It's tempting to describe Sweeney Todd's characters as one-note, although static might be more apt. There's no development or evolution here. Judge Turpin's act of nearly satanic malevolence sets the characters on a collision course with one another, and the result cannot be anything but tragic. The story's complexity arises from the manner in which the characters' desires intersect, conflict, and pass each other by. Given this approach, the casting of Johnny Depp as Todd strikes me as a wise move. Depp's good looks, charisma, and familiarity amid such slightly askew period trappings serve to lend Todd some sympathy, when he is actually due very little. Depp plays Todd as a man filled to overflowing with rage and remorse and nothing else. He's bloodthirsty and assured when planning and perpetrating his murders, but stoop-shoulder and dead-eyed the rest of the time.

Helena Bonham Carter isn't getting nearly enough attention for what I believe is the best performance in the film. Carter is too often cast for her distinctive looks, which are an admittedly compelling gestalt of chiseled, cherubic, and sinister. Her strongest performances—Fight Club and now Sweeney Todd—have both had a cocksure amorality, bedraggled and fiercely feminine. While Marla Singer was raw nihilism with a glimmer of romanticism, Mrs. Lovett is a far more convoluted and fascinating woman, at least in Burton's film. That she is a monster is no doubt, but like all the characters in Sweeney Todd, she has her own strain of naïveté. Incidentally, both Depp and Carter sing in the film, and they both do fine.

Up until now I've stood outside the Sweeney Todd phenomenon, but it's easy to see why the musical is regarded as a compelling milestone in American theater. In bringing it to film, Burton emphasizes not just the tangible horror of cannibalism and spouting jugulars, but the underlying horror of humanity's depraved potential and fallibility. The music is not, strangely enough, front and center in the film, but neither does it feel obligatory. The filmmakers seem to recognize that the story is powerful in its own right, but that it also benefits immeasurably from the telling via Sondheim's music. I can't think of a better antidote to the cloying taste of the Christmas season than this gruesome, blood-drenched morsel, realized by a director who seems born to do so.

The Golden Compass

2007 // USA - UK // Chris Weitz // December 9, 2007 // Theatrical Print

C - I'm hesitant to describe The Golden Compass as "epic fantasy," given that the film clocks in at under two hours. This adaptation of the first novel in Philip Pullman's engrossing His Dark Materials trilogy has a structural breeziness that does not complement the dense story it is striving to tell. It hits the right notes for an adolescent fantasy, but the methodical haste it insists upon—and the occasionally silly dialogue from writer and director Chris Weitz—does the rich source material a disservice. It's still a pleasurable arctic romp, with some rare scenes of dramatic complexity from its captivating female leads. Nonetheless, as someone who adored Pullman's novel, I find it tempting and all too easy to envision a more substantial adaptation, perhaps one where the filmmakers weren't so dispassionately determined to get their franchise off and running.

The Golden Compass takes place in a sort of fantasy steampunk parallel universe, where Jules Verne wonders and magical creatures exist side-by-side. Human souls have a physical reality in this world, taking the form of talking animal companions called daemons, one for each living person. One of the subtle pleasures of the film is observing the daemons as they perch on and slink around their masters. It is a credit to The Golden Compass' production design that Pullman's world is so faithfully recreated, often exactly as I had imagined it. The scenes of greater London are a bit unconvincing, like paint-by-numbers landscapes, but the arctic locales—the trading port of Trollesund, the polar bear stronghold Svalbard, and the evil laboratory Bolvangar—possess vitality and an unearthly eeriness. Pullman's world is impressively realized, but Weitz unfortunately engages in gee-whiz gaping at the sweep of it all, the sort of sin that is expected of George Lucas, and also of Peter Jackson in his more indulgent moments.

Dakota Blue Richards, one of the most charismatic young actors I've seen in a Hollywood film in some time, plays the film's heroine, Lyra Belacqua. An unapologetic liar and troublemaker, Lyra possesses fierce streaks of loyalty and courage, as well as a sixth sense for adult twaddle. She's a memorable and instantly likable child protagonist, and it is a credit to Richards' portrayal that this shines through the computer gimmickry that surrounds her. The other scene-stealer is Nicole Kidman as the glamorous, vicious Mrs. Coulter, a woman that both attracts and repulses Lyra. Despite a couple of eye-rolling lines, Kidman pulls off the tricky character marvelously, stitching together equal parts Gilded Age Bond villain and Joan Crawford by way of Faye Dunaway.

The rest of the cast looks good decked out in sumptuous, vaguely Victorian fantasy garb, but they don't have much to do beyond rushed exposition that ranges from the necessary to the preposterous. Sam Elliott is precisely the man I envisioned as Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby when reading the novel, and he's obviously having fun with the role. Yet Scoresby seems included mainly for the sake of color, and the antihero texture of his character is barely touched upon. As Lyra's explorer uncle Asriel, Daniel Craig is provided with an essentially pointless action sequence before he disappears from the film entirely. Asriel is a presence that hovers over Lyra's journey in the novel, and most of his development takes place offscreen. It seems wasteful and misguided to cast an actor of steely humanity like Craig in such a phantom role. Eva Green as the witch Serafina Pekkala is a pleasing sight, as are a host of British character actors including Derek Jacobi and an obligatory Christopher Lee, but everyone other than Richards and Kidman seems to be doing a full dress rehearsal of an abridged script.

The harried feel to The Golden Compass is at the expense of the novel's peculiar drama. Pullman lets his imaginary setting unfurl at a languid pace, permitting the reader to puzzle out the crucial details of Lyra's world. Pullman's diligence in building a convincing reality makes for some nail-biting tension in scenes that have no corollary in our world—such as when one character seizes Lyra's daemon. The film rarely achieves this sort of challenging feat, and then only due to some heavy lifting from the actors.

If my assessment of The Golden Compass seems lukewarm, it is partly because the bar has been set relatively high within recent memory. In no small part due to New Line's relentless promotion, The Golden Compass invites comparisons to other more successful epic fantasy franchises, particularly The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the appeal of these trilogies lies not just in their visceral thrills, but also in the manner in which the filmmakers realize the underlying mythos. Pirates in particular makes for an instructive contrast, for while the pace of the Disney films is as relentless as that in The Golden Compass, their speed serves to exhilarate and tickle. Yet Pirates is anything but truncated—the entire trilogy runs 461 minutes—and every moment brims with details that suggest the density of its droll, seventeenth century cartoon reality. (The intricacy of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's script and the elaborate mythology it has spawned is one of the series' underappreciated merits.) To its detriment, The Golden Compass seems to be striving for the opposite: an uninspired, economic adaptation of a vivid, meticulous source.

Nonetheless, The Golden Compass is serviceable Hollywood fare, and better than most adventure films aimed at the preteen set. Its polished production of Pullman's world will be sufficient to satisfy many fans of the novel. Try as he might, Weitz can't drain the inherent appeal from Lyra, from the evocative production design, or from the story's subversive themes. For these reasons alone, The Golden Compass is worthwhile entertainment. Yet as a fan of the novel, and as a filmgoer who has witnessed far more gratifying fantasy spectacles even in the past five years, I suspect that it could have been something more successful. Good starting points might have been a three-hour running time and a director whose understanding of the novel penetrates beyond surface details.

Into the Wild

2007 // USA // Sean Penn // December 6, 2007 // Theatrical Print

C - Shortly after graduating from Emory University in 1990, an upper-middle class straight-A student named Chris McCandless made a resolute and perhaps rash choice to disappear into America. Without confiding in his family, McCandless destroyed his identification, signed his remaining college fund over to charity, abandoned his car in the desert, and burned what was left of his pocket money. Two years later, McCandless' remains were discovered in the Alaskan wilderness, where he had been sheltering in the abandoned shell of a bus and eventually died of starvation. Jon Krakauer meticulously reconstructed McCandless' journey in his book Into the Wild. Sean Penn has now adapted Krakauer's work into a film that is fitful, even clumsy at times. Fortunately, Penn's palpable passion for McCandless' story, and the penetrating, mythical structure he lends it, more than make up for his occasional directorial missteps.

First the bad. This is the first of Penn's films that I've seen. Into the Wild demonstrates that he is an eager storyteller at heart, but perhaps not a natural within the medium of film. Experience will change this, I suspect, and it will be fascinating to see what sort of filmmaker Penn becomes as he hones his skills and sheds his more indulgent impulses. Into the Wild exhibits every stylistic flourish imaginable: slow-motion, voice-over narration, grainy flashbacks, extreme close-ups, stuttering edits, brightly superimposed text, and on and on. It's a flashy, shotgun approach to filmmaking. Intense artifice can be gratifying when it serves a story, but Penn applies these techniques sporadically and arbitrarily, such that they become distracting.

There are touches of brilliance in Penn's script, such as early scenes that adeptly and believably convey the bourgeois tension in McCandless' family life, but overall it tends towards the clunky. The narration by Jena Malone as McCandless' sister rambles in a lyrical sort of way, but it's far easier to swallow than certain suspect lines of dialog. When Emile Hirsch as McCandless urgently intones an Oprah-ready platitude such as, "If you see something you want, you have to reach out and take it," I found myself uncertain of Penn's intentions. If this line is meant as a straightforward statement of the film's ethos, then it's painfully insipid. More generously, Penn may be counting on the viewer's lukewarm reaction to this ridiculous line in order to expose McCandless' inch-deep worldview. It's hard to say.

These sorts of stumbles might have left another film in shambles, but Penn manages to overcome his own ungainly presentation, perhaps stunningly so. The bedrock of Into the Wild is its story, and it is an undeniably compelling tale whatever one may think of McCandless' morals or common sense. What American—especially a college-educated young man—doesn't dream of discarding the obligations and injustices of modern society and returning to a simpler existence? It is telling that Penn patiently waited ten years for the McCandless family to warm to the notion of this film.

Penn's spirited, cunning stroke is to stage Into the Wild not as a sweeping biopic, or even a cut-and-dried dramatization, but as a kind of Hero's Journey. It is the rare film in which the "Inspired by True Events" tag seems perfectly appropriate, given the legendary quality to Penn's approach. The film cuts between two timelines, one beginning at McCandless' graduation just before his break with his old life, the other a year and a half into his journey just as he sets into the Alaskan wilderness alone. Unlike some of the film's more gratuitous touches, these interwoven timelines are crucial. Penn seems to recognize the tedium and despair that would drag down the second half of the film were it told chronologically. As McCandless' efforts to sustain himself in the wilds unravel, the story of how he came to this fate unfolds on a parallel track. Just as McCandless dwells on the memories of his journey and the lessons they offer, the viewer is offered context and insight.

McCandless romanticizes his withdrawal from society as an intensely private endeavor in the tradition of Henry Thoreau or Jack London. Penn ingeniously approaches McCandless' journey—and its consequences—as a moral lesson for public consumption. I find it inexplicable that some viewers have found the portrayal of McCandless as ambiguous, or even hagiographic. If the ham-fisted bits of dialogue are frustrating, it is only because the message is blazingly clear for most of the film. McCandless' death could have been portrayed as a martyrdom, but Penn aims for something more pointed. He is recovering the young man's belated revelations for those of us who still languish in civilization, and these revelations indict the very impulses that drove McCandless north.

As McCandless ambles towards his fate, he meets a succession of challenges and fellow travelers. Penn is not building a story around half-baked Joseph Campbell principles, but striving to understand a distinctly American tragedy through a timeless framework. Tellingly, title cards introduce the pre-Alaska phases of McCandless' quest as life stages. The traveler meets a pair of aging hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), a gregarious wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn), a crusty widower (Hal Holbrook), and other assorted characters. Each offers some wisdom, receives insight from McCandless in turn, and highlights the fundamental paradox of him. McCandless talks condescendingly of the morality of solitude, but he seems most content in the company of others. He is confronted with monsters—ranger patrols, railroad bulls, raging rivers, grizzly bears—but the final demon is, of course, the demon within.

Some of the strong reaction to Into the Wild seems to stem from the viewer's assessment of McCandless himself. Was he a noble dreamer or a feckless nitwit? Such questions were first raised in Krakauer's book, and a stale dramatization might have courted faux controversy by rehashing them. Yet given Penn's wholly original approach, criticism of the sympathetic treatment of McCandless seems misguided. The film is hardly a canonization, as his foolishness, self-absorption, and lack of preparation are not glossed. And still he is somewhat sympathetic, for although he was not a hero, he is this story's Hero. Emile Hirsch plays McCandless with genuine warmth and a touch of dimwitted arrogance, but generally keeps the performance inscrutable. Hirsch and Penn seem to recognize that he must be something of a cipher. As in all legends, he is a proxy for the viewer.

Penn deserves criticism for engaging in the slapdash glitz one might expect in a student's first film, not the fourth feature from a veteran actor. Yet Penn also deserves credit for crafting a stirring and imaginative work from a tragedy that might have otherwise have been senseless. For me, the latter overcame the former.