IMDb #158 Review: Into the Wild (2007)

Source: Wikipedia

A college student graduates with all the education, friends, money, and potential he could ever want. Problem  -- he doesn't want it. So he ditches his troubled family, burns his savings, abandons his car, and bums around America for a while. The ultimate goal: Alaska.

This earnest young man seeks REALITY and TRUTH. He conveniently ignores the REALITY that his sudden disappearance plunged his (flawed) family into unspeakable pain and the TRUTH that he regularly flouts the law and gambles with his life and can't trust luck to protect him forever.

It's still inspiring, and all that crap. In the tender years of early manhood, this guy goes out and does crazy things. While I write about movies and you read about it.

Tired of things, he works on a farm in South Dakota. Under the name Alexander Supertramp, he hops on a hippie wagon by the California shore and rekindles a starchild romance. He paddles down a river, lacking a license or any relevant experience, and dodges the river patrol in time to run into Danish tourists with lax standards of public nudity. He sneaks in and out of Mexico just to prove he can. Short on cash, he works fast food, with no identification or permanent place of residence. He sprouts a magnificent hobo beard.

And finally -- chronologically interspersed with these other adventures -- he hitchhikes, then hikes, to Alaska. To live off the land and read and sleep in a convenient abandoned bus.

"If you want something in life," he preaches, "reach out and grab it." Unfortunately, LIFE is a petulant bitch who resents unsolicited groping. She gladly recompenses amorous advances with a slap in the face and a knee in the crotch. As he learns, in his attempts to subdue the Alaskan wilderness with aught but his wits and naivete.

(Starving is a shitty hobby. But so's wasting ammo because you never learned to shoot, and raising an impromptu maggot farm on meat you never learned to preserve.)

This remarkable epic is based on a true story, admittedly with some fictional elements (a nudist colony with attractive people in it? Impossible). But the lesson remains just as true. After all the books, experiences, reflections in solitude, what does he learn, thanks to the famous wise hobo Tolstoy? HAPPINESS IS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.

(Agreed. Because as much fun as it is churning out jokes for the Internet, it's even better knowing someone read it and had fun. Maybe even emitted a pitiful snicker.)

148 minutes.