Into the Wild (2007)Movies

Into the Wild review by Kyle Smith I’ve seen 52 (different) movies in the last 52 days, so I don’t think I’ve been slacking as a film critic, but until today I hadn’t seen Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild.” I was exhilarated and devastated. The story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), an Emory graduate who turned his back on his beloved sister and his bickering parents (William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden) to wander the wilderness and finally meet his doom in Alaska, evidently struck close to Penn’s heart. You can sense Penn and Eddie Vedder, who provides an elegantly stripped-down score, fighting with themselves over the crushing beauty of what McCandless, who restyled himself “Alexander Supertramp,”...