Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)

Based on the real-life story of Christopher McCandless, who turned his back on university, his family and the materialistic world to begin a trip without end through the vast open spaces of the States, Sean Penn's gravely earnest film captured numerous awards and the imagination of Americans with their idealisation of a lost frontier existence and the poetry of 'the road'. McCandless is essentially a fiercely idealistic, arrested adolescent with parent issues, who spouts pseudo-spiritual aphorisms constantly, and its clear that we're meant to not just indulge this but be drawn in my his single-minded vision, even if we know that he'll meet his end alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
The style is ponderous with lots of dwelling on animals and broad vistas, in the style of Malick, and you feel that if they could work in him swimming with dolphins too, they would. Meanwhile, the people he meets outside the cities are all salt-of-the-earth folk and kindly hippies, as you would expect of Penn with his usual putting of the 'common man' on a pedestal. To further underline the manly soulfulness of his quest, there's Eddie Vedder's dirge soundtrack seemingly stuck on a loop too.
Emile Hirsch's bright-eyed performance is a strong suit, as is the last chapter where he befriends Hal Holbrook's lonely widower. The character's end is also unexpectedly touching, despite his obvious stupidity at having brought it on inexorably. But the little fucker really could have perished at least an hour earlier, as far as I'm concerned.

5/10