Into The Wild (Matt)

This movie tells the story of a man who forsakes all that he has in order to live the life of a hobo.

What a great opening sentence. I've been trying to think of a way to start this review for quite a few minutes and I think I finally came up with a winner.

So yes, Into the Wild is a story of a young man, fresh out of college. He has good grades, he has around $25,000 in the bank, he's qualified to attend Harvard Law, and he parents want to buy him a new car. He's living the dream. The only problem is he's living somebody else's dream. He feels like all the material things that he owns are nothing but distractions from the actual living of his life. Indeed it seems the only possessions he seems to value at all are his books. He gives all his things away and sets out on his own.

Armed with only his knowledge he sets out on a quest for happiness. As the story unfolds we find out a bit more about his motivations and we begin to understand why someone who has so much would set out with absolutely nothing, and I personally found this quest to be very noble. I am to a certain extent, even jealous of him for being able to just strike out with nothing like he did.

Well you might have guessed this by now, but by far to me the best part of this film was this story. I felt close to the character, and even felt some of myself in him as I watched him tramping around the country, into Mexico, and eventually even all the way to Alaska. I was never once bored, despite the lack of action.

Emile Hirsch, who played Chris McCandless, was amazing in this. He portrayed his character with a certain dignity that must have been hard to put into place on what was essentially, just a hobo.

The music is interesting, mainly because the vocalist on every track is none other than Pearl Jam's Eddy Vedder. He lends his voice to slow folk sounding acoustic songs and the result creates a very human, very low tech sort of experience.

There are moments where the movie gets a little slow. I know I mentioned above that I wasn't ever bored, and I stand by that, however this movie runs around 2 and 1/2 hours long, and some of the scenes could have probably been shortened or cut all together. This movie tries hard to stay close to the book and to the truth of the character, this longness is most likely a result of that. If you aren't enjoying the story however, I can see how someone could get tired of this film after a while.

8 magic buses out of 10.

~Matt