Wide-Open Spaces

The criticisms of Into the Wild are easy to anticipate. Is the movie too long? Probably, at least by that hallowed yardstick that says a film must move rapidly from point A to B — something McCandless himself was in no hurry to do. Is it less than judicious with respect to McCandless's parents and sister, who exist in the film mostly as fragments of memory, phantoms of a discarded existence? Arguably so, until you consider that, during his entire two years on the road, McCandless failed to place so much as a single phone call home. Part of the enduring fascination with McCandless is that his story tends to mean considerably different things depending on where you're standing — whether you are parent or child, restless wanderer or happy conformist. Penn's triumph is that he sees McCandless as both boy and man, prophet and fraud, vagabond and visionary. Which is, one suspects, awfully close to how McCandless saw himself.