#Into the Wild 荒野生存

（文末附觀影資源）

You can do anything. You can go anywhere. Money, power is an illusion. It's up here. You can be here. Me and you. You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things. If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

- Christopher McCandless

《Into the Wild》 is the affecting true story of Christopher McCandless, a bright young American college graduate who horrified his parents by sending his $24,000 law school fund to Oxfam, abandoning all his possessions and hiking off into the wilderness in search of a radical re-engagement with nature, unsullied by money or the career rat-race - all in the style of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Jack London.

In 1992, at the age of 24, McCandless was found dead in the Alaskan backwoods in an abandoned bus he was using as a rough-and-ready bivouac, like a 20th-century anchorite. His life story and ecstatic passion for the natural world of North America was reconstructed from his journals, converted into a bestselling book by Jon Krakauer, and now adapted for the screen by Penn himself.

Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source. We meet Christopher (Emile Hirsch) as an idealistic dreamer, in reaction against his proud parents (William Hurt?and?Marcia Gay Harden) and his bewildered sister (Jena Malone).

He had good grades at Emory; his future in law school was right there in his grasp. Why did he disappear from their lives, why was his car found abandoned, where was he, and why, why, why?

He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of nature. In centuries past such men might have been saints, retreating to a cave or hidden hermitage, denying themselves all pleasures except subsistence. He sees himself not as homeless, but as a man freed from homes.

In the book, Krakauer traces his movements through the memories of people he encounters on his journey. It was an impressive reporting achievement to track them down, and Penn's film affectionately embodies them in strong performances. These are people who take in the odd youth, feed him, shelter him, give him clothes, share their lives, mentor him and worry as he leaves to continue his quest, which seems to them, correctly, as doomed.

By now McCandless has renamed himself Alexander Supertramp. He is validated by his lifestyle choice. He meets such people as Rainey and Jan (Brian Dieker and?Catherine Keener), leftover hippies still happily rejecting society, and Wayne (Vince Vaughn), a hard-drinking, friendly farmer. The most touching contact he makes is with Ron (Hal Holbrook), an older man who sees him clearly and with apprehension, and begins to think of him as a wayward grandson. Christopher lectures this man, who has seen it all, on what he is missing and asks him to follow him up a steep hillside to see the next horizon. Ron tries, before he admits he is no longer in condition.

And then McCandless disappears from the maps of memory, into unforgiving Alaska. Yes, it looks beautiful. It is all he dreamed of. He finds an abandoned bus where no bus should be and makes it his home. He tries hunting, not very successfully. He lives off the land, but the land is a zero-tolerance system. From his journals and other evidence, Penn reconstructs his final weeks. Emile Hirsch plays him in a hypnotic performance, turning skeletal, his eyes sinking into his skull while they still burn with zeal. It is great acting, and more than acting.

This is a reflective, regretful, serious film about a young man swept away by his uncompromising choices. Two of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of strangers. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up eventually in a bus of one kind or another. Sean Penn himself fiercely idealistic, uncompromising, a little less angry now, must have read the book and reflected that there, but for the grace of God, went he. The movie is so good partly because it means so much, I think, to its writer-director. It is a testament like the words that Christopher carved into planks in the wilderness.

---------- Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

《荒野生存Into the Wild(2007)》導(dǎo)演:Sean Penn西恩·潘 https://pan.baidu.com/s/1UF7AoLEA6ebzkggoYO7OOQ

提取碼：u2cx