http://www.naachgaana.com/2007.....-the-wild/

“Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” is certainly visual—it’s entirely too visual, to the point of being cheaply lyrical. Penn can’t stop swirling around mountaintops, as if he were selling S.U.V.s, and he pads this hundred-and-forty-minute movie with slow-motion episodes and other cinematographic divertissements. The hyperactive camera style is bizarrely mismatched to the movie’s subject, which is one of single-minded asceticism and spiritual purity. Penn has adapted Jon Krakauer’s chastely written 1996 book about Christopher Johnson McCandless, an Emory graduate who, at the age of twenty-two, gave away his savings and cut all ties with his family. He tramped around the country and then, determined to live outside any social structure, and without friendship or love, he headed north to the Alaskan wilderness, where he died, alone, in August, 1992. Krakauer defends McCandless against the accusations of arrogance and incompetence levelled by experienced hunters and explorers. The boy, he insists, made mistakes and had bad luck, but he was no different from thousands of other young seekers of the solitary sublime.

Penn, who wrote the screenplay, follows that celebratory line—his hero dies happily, facing the sun. But, to Penn’s credit, he doesn’t disguise the unconscious cruelty in McCandless’s quest. Emile Hirsch, who plays McCandless, is handsome, with an open smile, and he makes the reckless adventurer alert and friendly and attractive to everyone he meets. The movie begins with McCandless saying good-bye to the last person he will ever see and beginning his struggle against starvation in Alaska, and then cuts back to his wanderings, and becomes a kind of journey among forgotten American subcultures. A South Dakota wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn, playing it straight), an aging hippie (Catherine Keener), and a retired Army man living on the edge of the California desert (Hal Holbrook) all grow fond of Chris and ask him to put down his backpack and stay. They are, in effect, offering themselves as surrogate parents, but he always takes off, leaving them bereft—they sense what’s happening to him.

It’s possible to appreciate the implacability of this boy’s revolt without taking it as seriously as Krakauer and Penn do. McCandless rejects not only family and bourgeois life but also sensual life, and he’s incapable of sustaining an interest in anyone outside himself. The movie makes it clear that he has been heavily influenced by Tolstoy’s later writings, but apparently no one told him that Tolstoy, a Russian aristocrat and a soldier, renounced worldly pleasures only after a tremendous career on horseback, in bed, and at his writing table. Penn re-creates McCandless as a literal-minded saint who lives off the land and produces nothing but his own beatitude. He hasn’t experienced enough of life for his rejection of it to carry much weight, and Penn can’t see the egocentricity in a revolt that is as naïve as it is grandly self-destructive. ♦ “

Quite true..

I guess I ultimately liked the movie more than you did. Perhaps the road movie aspect of it overcame these other problems for me. But certainly your points are valid ones.

On Into The Wild – I have mixed thoughts on this film. I really liked it as a travelogue on the American landscape, but as a character piece it felt strangely OVERdeveloped, striking some of the same notes over and over again. It develops a Buddha figure out of its central character, and grows somewhat ponderous for me. Some of the detours were amusing enough (none more so than when he encounters Vince Vaughn’s delicious character who adds juice to the proceedings, and Hal Holbrook who reaches depths that the film often doesn’t) but for the most part I felt like there was a lot of unearned and overblown spiritual and intellectual revelations here. And speaking of Malick influences, this film is covered in them, and not always with the best of results.

The one important feature in terms of which these films might also be graded is by considering how much of the post-Civil War backdrop is utilized as part of the narrative’s drive. For example in the Ray version this angle is much more important than it is in Fuller’s film. The current film in a way combines Ray and Fuller to a degree by certainly alluding to the Civil War but also ultimately being the Fuller kind of psychological portrait.

One of the most interesting characteristics of the recent works is the sense of an ‘end’ that pervades the film from the very beginning. The film of course deals with the ‘final days’ of Jesse James in so many ways but still there is a near post-apocalyptic sense here, fittingly in my view for a post-Civil War America. There is not much consciousness of ‘Reconstruction’ (even if we are not really in the ‘South’). Actually this is a point that Ray dwells on to some degree without actually naming the political process. Reconstruction in his world (or even to an extent in the Henry King film) is what engenders the founding violence that then enables the James brothers to become outlaws.

Another Western that has the theme of Confederate soldiers continuing to loot Union trains at the very end of the Civil War (this is a theme that some of the Jesse James films privilege, the idea of a Robin Hood figure who loots the ‘North’ to give to the ‘South’ or in a more specific sense tries to cripple the ‘banking’ system of the ‘new’ Union) is Rio Lobo (Hawks).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55BZ2gSsSmY

On Jesse James one of the more immediate aesthetic influences here seemed to be Terence Malick, specially the one of Days of Heaven.

Yeah “Lions for Lambs” SCREAMS “Issue Film!” which is fine although I’m uncertain about this. I do like Cruise, though, and the rest of the cast, including Streep, Peter Berg and the talented young Derek Luke is enough for me to want to see it…

Speaking of previews I saw one of Lions for Lambs! What an uninspiring title! Redford’s heart seems to be in the right place here but not too sure about this one.

No Country for Old Men is certainly one I’m looking forward to as well, even if I’m awaiting the Road more than this. I believe the latter is also being made into a film.

Then of course there’s that ‘oil’ film based on the Upton Sinclair novel, the one you mentioned as well sometime back, I forget the title.

Incidentally, another film that seems to carry a few Western tropes is No Country For Old Men, still my most awaited American film this year.

One of the problems here is that it is too late to simply make a regular Western. Any filmmaker will always be burdened, perhaps too burdened, with the history. As such a film like 3:10 to Yuma, for better or worse, is ‘deeper’ than the original, but this comes at a cost in terms of attracting audiences.

Jesse James of course is not a ‘mainstream’ film in any sense and Pitt deserves a great deal of credit for being a producer here. The film just cost 30m apparently but I doubt they’ll recoup this cost.

Re: Pitt’s James – I agree that he has to be enigmatic, but for me, the James character here required an iconic sort of presence that Pitt didn’t particularly conjure for me. That’s all. I agree that he has to be refracted to give the Ford character “more” no question there. Affleck was superb though, as was Rockwell.

I absolutely loved the look of this film. The only other Western that looks like it, to my knowledge is McCabe and Mrs. Miller…

I found the film to be a masterwork. Goodfella has already mentioned the awesome visuals here. Sarris in this otherwise fine piece doesn’t mention it and I am not schooled in the same but I think that this film almost assuredly relies on certain American landscape traditions from the 19th century and perhaps a bit beyond. There might be a Winslow Homer or a Thomas Cole lurking here! But elsewhere there also seems to be a hearkening to older Dutch traditions (I am specifically thinking of the way characters are sometimes framed in windows) and beyond this a lot of the interior settings. In any case I am out of my league here but every scene in this film seems to unfold like a painting which beyond the cliche means that every scene seems to have been truly composed on canvas as opposed to through a lens.

Of course this is also the rare film these days with some reliance on the long take, a film not particularly bothered about keeping the audience attention intact with staccato cuts and so on.

I think that this is an immensely rewarding film for anyone who has the patience and the attention to get ‘absorbed’ into its world. It’s a challenging work, even a difficult one in some ways, the pleasures are not instant or obvious ones. Moroever the narrative remains enigmatic from beginning to end. But this is ultimately a work of remarkable performances, outstanding sense of mis-en-scene , stunning psychological exploration, perhaps even a nihilistic one in the final analysis which is not a demerit by any means.

I would certainly like to revisit this film. And while this is always a bit of a cliche I think it does particular violence to this sort of work to not see it on the big screen.

I note Sarris has mentioned in his review here all the earlier Jesse James films. This is by far the greatest of the film versions even if the earlier works were decidedly less ambitious ones. Of those earlier ones the Fuller version is the best.

Finally I might disagree with Goodfella just a bit on the Jesse James point. I think that James is probably kept very enigmatic here to let the refractions (by way of the other characters but especially Bob Ford) acquire that much power. Had we ‘understood’ or even ‘known’ Jesse James more we might have empathized with him (I think the film as it stands never allows us to do that) and that would have created a very different sort of work.

At the same time I am not going to argue that some of it isn’t indulgent but I think it is always a little problematic to decide in a work of this sort what can really be ‘taken out’.

Agreed.