AVVERTENZA: chi non ha visto il film e non ha letto il libro (e non si è fatto spoilerare uno o l'altro) sappia che a partire dal prossimo paragrafo potrebbe trovare elementi rivelatori del finale della storia: non si appresti dunque a rompere e smetta di leggere ora, subito.
Anche se penso che, forse, il finale di questa storia uno dovrebbe conoscerlo prima: il libro uscì dopo che la storia aveva avuto una certa eco sui quotidiani, la conclusione era evidente fin dalla cover and, if I remember correctly, the author says Jon Kracauer from the earliest pages of the first chapter.
That said, I go.
In the book "The Day of the Owl " is a phrase that I really like and bring it to memory, surely paraphrasing. The truth is like the moon at the bottom of a well. You look down and you look out and see the moon. But if you fall in, one at the bottom is not the moon, is the truth.
It is a truth of this kind that is at the end of the film and the beginning of the book that inspired it, the twenty-four Chris McCandless: just released, with excellent grades, the university is realizes it has no intention of following the path that is traced by their parents. Only, unlike Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate ") of its Badlands takes a more radical way: a waiver of almost all his property to the Franciscan terrain and departure, with a rucksack on his back and little else, to try to face the world with as little baggage as possible.
The abandonment of the parents and sister without a note of explanation, hitchhiking, odd jobs along the way to win you need to survive (but before leaving he gave to charity $ 24,000, all his savings, for the continuation studies), the encounter of diverse and valuable examples of humanity, but the ultimate goal is the total solitude, direct contact with nature and the challenge of survival with no helmet. Chris wants to arrive in Alaska, and get alone and live alone in the forest in search of a personal revolution, spiritual / existential.
But nature is a bastard, and just lower the guard is ready to fuck. The star of "Into the Wild " seeks the truth, and perhaps the location, but at the bottom of the well. Trapped in an old abandoned bus, starving, dying painfully of starvation, almost imagining, in the final moment, her return to the arms of their parents.
The story of McCandless è accaduta davvero: se ne parlò abbastanza sui giornali al tempo della tragedia, e ancora di più quando il giornalista Jon Krakauer le dedicò un libro che ricostruiva la faccenda nei dettagli (in italiano è uscito come " Nelle terre estreme " e Corbaccio lo ha ripubblicato a ridosso dell'uscita del film. 268 pagine, 16 euro). Testo molto secco, cronachistico, senza il minimo compiacimento, con le testimonianze di alcune delle persone che avevano incontrato McCandless lungo la sua avventura, e anche con gli appunti, agghiaccianti, con cui il ragazzo stesso aveva documentato la sua fine: un diario fatto di annotazioni quasi tutte brevissime e che fu ritrovato nell'autobus accanto a quel che restava del corpo.
Later, Krakauer wrote a book would become much more popular on a similar story: entitled "Into Thin Air" (Into Thin Air) , is the story of Everest trip ended in tragedy and has multiple a tone far less, because in that case the author was among the protagonists of the events recounted. "Into the Wild" instead is, indeed, little more than a reconstruction, in which the author gives maximum importance to the figure of McCandless, trying to stick to the facts or statements, and without giving them too much to speculate on why.
Also because there is no need: as Guccini sang with nostalgia, at twenty it was really stupid . And the search for teenager's death becomes a big story when the protagonist can actually find it. Who reads "In the lands extreme" closes it with tears in his eyes, recognizing the protagonist a friend who in his time he has lost the challenge your limits. And maybe also recognizing himself, that some time has made a giant shit and it went well, but he also could go wrong.
is a fairly slim book that reads quickly. But Sean Penn has a film of 146 minutes, endless, repetitive, and verbose, what is worse, shot using a constant search for a style that gives the whole exercise a disturbing patina of insincerity. There is everything in the movie: the jump cut, accelerations and decelerations, the oblique shots, the freeze frames, out of focus, even an offensive look in the car. A catalog of cinematic Mossette young, independent, from new wave with fifty years of delay. All that stuff, for heaven's sake, there was also already in bell'episodio directed by Penn in ' anthology September 11, but there applied to a story overtly symbolic and unreal, and in any case limited to little more than ten minutes in length.
Penn was one of the main characters of "The Thin Red Line " and a little surprising that he chose such an approach diametrically opposed to that of Malick for a story in which the issue of cruel and insensitive beauty of nature was so strong. But Okay, it is said that Malick's style would work best with this story, and Penn seems more interested in the meetings along the way: two hippies a little 'far from the years of Kerouac, a wheat farmer, a beautiful sixteen and one, an old soldier, a widower, a couple of young Danes. They are the best moments of the film, those in which the directing is less evident satisfaction, and perhaps are a bit 'too much but it works.
works less, however, the familiar element: William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden is as good as ever, but become two parents too stuffed programmatically. And the voiceover of her sister soon became a comment cumbersome, especially when you add to that of the protagonist (and who knows in this massive use of speech, Penn illudesse not to follow in the footsteps of Malick). We talk too much and too long, in "Into the Wild", and is too much on the family, the family that McCandless instead chose to leave behind, at least for a while '.
When you get to the last, harrowing, twenty minutes, boredom polluter too long the suggestion of the tragedy and the film remains a huge part of the potential emotional impact. Perhaps only those who do not know, before entering, as would end the matter may fail really excited, but it is evidence that those who moved out due to the force of history, not that of a film on the whole rather disappointing.
Rome Film Festival, October 25, 2007
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