Movie Review: Into The Wild (2007)

A survival drama, Into The Wild is one young man's journey of self-discovery, existential peril emerging as the price of absolute freedom.

23-year-old Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) hitchhikes into Alaska, then sets off into the wilderness on foot with minimal supplies, determined to live free and survive off the land. After crossing a river he stumbles upon an abandoned old bus and makes it his base. In various flashbacks, his story is revealed.

Chris is from an upper middle class Virginia family and a graduate of prestigious Emory College. His excellent academic record qualifies him to enter law school. But tension is high between him and his parents Walt and Billie (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), who are cold, materialistic, argumentative, and secretive. In contrast Chris and his sister Carine (Jena Malone) are close.

After graduating Chris donates his remaining college fund to charity, destroys his identification cards, and embarks on a cross-country trip, cutting off contact with his family. He assumes the name Alex Supertramp and sets Alaska as a target. Along the way he meets an aging hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian H. Dierker), a combine operator (Vince Vaughn), a young couple from Denmark, a budding folk musician (Kristen Stewart), and a lonely old man (Hal Holbrook). His journey includes a Mexican detour before he makes it to Alaska, where survival will be both exhilarating and difficult.

Based on a true story as documented in the book by Jon Krakauer, Into The Wild recreates an audacious escape from imposed social structures. Writer and director Sean Penn goes big to represent an ambitious vision unconstrained by rules, with grand landscapes filling the screen, nature an often imposing presence dwarfing humans. A running time of 148 minutes underlines the operatic themes of Chris' quest for freedom.

The scale does threaten to overwhelm the content. Stripping away the romanticism and literary quotes, this is also the small story of one young man abandoning his privilege, imposing despair on his family, and chasing an ill-advised definition of freedom in a naive and anti-social interpretation of happiness. Various levels of mystique can be layered upon the cross-country journey, but the uneasy sense that Chris was a troubled young man prevails.

Emile Hirsch's portrayal of a determined traveler combines intensity with swagger, while Hal Holbrook adds lonely poignancy. The individual chapters and various en route encounters break down the journey into manageable morsels, but the collective is stronger than the individual. Despite some attempts to inject profundity, precious little is genuinely memorable or meaningful in Chris' interactions with assorted hippies, tourists, geezers and lost souls.

Carine's narration and childhood flashbacks reveal the home environment despised by Chris. Walt and Billie are professionals providing every opportunity for their children, although their marriage is always one argument away from rupturing. A family revelation could have been perceived as a sordid scandal by a son in his formative years. Frequent family meetings are the worst atrocity imposed upon Chris and Carine, and by most measures the McCandless household as portrayed is typically troubled but far from a hellhole.

Into The Wild is left with impressive grandeur overwhelming foundational issues. The journey is scenic, the survival ordeal harrowing, the ending fateful, but the origins are underdeveloped.



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Movie Review: Killer Joe (2011)

A raw crime drama, Killer Joe takes pleasure wallowing in humanity's sewer. The twisted plot offers plenty of perversions before unravelling.

In Dallas, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) owes money to drug dealers. He conspires with his dimwitted father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) to hire police detective "Killer" Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who moonlights as an assassin-for-hire, to kill Ansel's ex-wife. Her insurance policy pays out $50,000 to her daughter Dottie (Juno Temple), a naive young woman and victim of child abuse. After paying Killer, the plan is for Chris, Ansel and Dottie to share the money, but then Ansel insists his current wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) also gets a cut.

Joe takes a liking to Dottie, and in lieu of receiving his $25,000 fee up-front, he demands Dottie as a "retainer". With his sister now a sex slave and Joe making himself comfortable in the home of Ansel and Sharla, Chris starts to have doubts about the whole plot, but much worse is to come.

Luxuriating in the grime of immoral behaviour, Killer Joe aims for Coen brothers shadings. Tracy Letts wrote the script based on his own play, and William Friedkin directs with one eye towards sly humour and the other firmly fixed on extremes of depravity. With the slime glistening under the Texas skies, Killer Joe promises much and at least for a while delivers fine moments of white trash artistry

The Smith family are mired in poverty, stupidity and the pursuit of lost causes. Ansel at least knows he is dim and is therefore one step ahead of Chris, who is still awakening to his limitations. Sharla is just looking for a meal ticket and a roof over her head, and for now, Ansel will do. Which leaves Dottie as the only character worth caring for, a naive, pitiful young woman, essentially sold into sexual slavery by her brother and father. By the time Chris decides he ought to maybe rescue his sister, the damage is done.

Killer Joe struts into this family sniffing easy opportunities first for money then for free sexual favours. He is much smarter than Chris and Ansel, but also much more nefarious. And when his worst tendencies surface in the third act, Killer Joe unfortunately stumbles and falls. Letts and Friedkin settle for a stagebound single-set climax, then go looking for extremes of behaviour (involving fried chicken) for maximum shock value. The gambit misfires, the search for cheap notoriety sacrificing the drama's sharp edges.

Matthew McConaughey cruises through the film in icy arrogance mode, Emile Hirsch compensating with frantic desperation. Thomas Haden Church finds the necessary open-mouthed imbecility. Gina Gershon and Juno Temple are asked to do most of the heavy lifting, both actresses displaying courage in physically humiliating roles.

Killer Joe earns head-shaking stares, but when the drama is overrun by theatrics, it's time to look away.



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Movie Review: Lone Survivor (2013)

A war endurance story, Lone Survivor is a harrowing recreation of a mission-gone-wrong in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The setting is June, 2005, in Afghanistan. Four Navy SEALs are deployed on a remote mountaintop near an isolated village on a reconnaissance mission to identify and track a Taliban leader. The team consists of sniper Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Lieutenant Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Communications Specialist Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and sniper Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster). Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen (Eric Bana) tracks their progress from a forward operations base, but communications are patchy due to the difficult terrain.

The mission is compromised when three local goat herders stumble onto the SEAL's observation point. Murphy and his men decide to retreat from the area, but local anti-American militias are alerted to their presence and the four men are caught in a vicious firefight, vastly outnumbered and cut off from any support.

Directed by Peter Berg and based on the book of the same name by Luttrell, Lone Survivor stays close to the facts and pays respectful attention to the events of the ill-fated Operation Red Wings. Similar in tone to Black Hawk Down, Lone Survivor looks for the acts of valour and unshakeable brotherhood emerging in the midst of a ruinous military misadventure.

Berg steers clear of any politicizing or examination of why the US troops are in Afghanistan in the first place. This is a story zoomed-in on four highly-trained warriors attempting to execute a mission, and forced to innovate their way out of trouble while under fire. The ordeal is agonizing, the casualties are high, and Berg's cameras do not flinch in the face of bullet strikes, physical and mental suffering, and death.

Berg's script relied on actual mission reports and autopsies to capture the details of individual wounds, and Lone Survivor is a testimony to the eternal horrors of war, up-close and personal. More than once the SEALs tumbled down steep rocky embankments to try and escape their pursuers, and the images of human bodies hurtling out of control and bouncing repeatedly off hard objects are painful to watch.

Once the combat starts at around the 45 minute mark, Lone Survivor unleashes and sustains unrelenting intensity, the bonding between the men rising as their casualties mount and the inevitable arrives. Berg achieves a memorable combat and heroism climax when Murphy, under intense fire, insists on reaching a rocky but exposed high point to try and establish communications and call for help.

Given the film's focus on just the four men, Lone Survivor could have invested more time in their backstories. Berg provides a few perfunctory and abstract references to wives and girlfriends, and leaves it at that. The film also unfortunately falls into the tired Hollywood trap of over-juicing the final drama, placing Luttrell in perils that he never actually faced, when his actual ordeal should have been sufficient.

But these are relatively minor quibbles. Lone Survivor is a superior and forceful war film, capturing soldiers at their best under the worst possible conditions.

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Movie Review: Milk (2008)

The film biography of gay rights activist Harvey Milk is an inspirational story of one man's courage, strength and tenacity in the face of seemingly overwhelming forces.

Picking up the story when Harvey turns 40 years old having achieved nothing in life, Milk recounts the years between 1970, when Harvey moved from New York to San Francisco, and 1978, when he was assassinated along with the Mayor at City Hall.

Upon arrival in San Francisco Harvey and his partner Scott Smith (James Franco) settle in the Castro neighbourhood, which quickly morphs into the magnetic focal point of gays from around the world. Harvey's outspokenness for the rights of all minorities soon elevates him to the status of unofficial mayor of Castro, and he gathers around him a group of dedicated activists. He also meets and mentors Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), who would go on to become a prominent campaigner for the rights of AIDS victims.

Harvey takes a run at public office on several occasions, and repeatedly fails to get elected; the constant electioneering takes its toll on his private life, and Smith leaves him. Anti-gay sentiment is meanwhile sweeping across America, with local laws protecting minority rights defeated in many jurisdictions. In 1977 Harvey finally wins a seat as a San Francisco Supervisor, and becomes the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States.

In the last year of his life, Harvey Milk faces his three biggest battles: Proposition 6 is on the California ballot, and if passed it will force the firing of all gay teachers in the state; Harvey's partner Jack is becoming increasingly unstable and difficult to manage; and Supervisor Jack White is a political rival who becomes ever more erratic. One of these challenges ends in a great triumph: the other two in utmost tragedy.

Sean Penn delivers a tour-de-force performance as Harvey Milk, capturing a man publicly confident about his position in life, embracing the leadership role that history selected for him, while privately tortured by the consequences of failure.

Through the struggles of Harvey's life director Gus Van Sant seamlessly presents the broader story of the early battles  gays had to fight to gain equality and basic human rights. It's an eye-opening, sometimes sickening tale of wide-scale high-level fear-mongering, abuse and dehumanization taking place in a supposedly enlightened country.

Missing from Milk is any meaningful portrayal of the first 40 years of Harvey's life. We just gets his assertion that he achieved nothing to that point. Some understanding of his upbringing and the events that shaped him into the man that he became would have provided better character rounding.

The chronicle of Harvey Milk is ultimately the story of those rare men who embrace a unique role to define and shape the course of history through peaceful means against impossible odds, often at great personal cost. In an age when seeking instant personal gratification is the rule and violence is celebrated, it is a tale not told often enough.

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