The quiet man

“I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!”

Trailer de la pelicula

Into the wild (Hacia rutas salvajes)

Director: Sean Penn
Writers (WGA): Sean Penn (screenplay) / Jon Krakauer (book)
Release Date: 1 September 2007 (USA); 25 January 2008 (Spain)
Genre: Adventure / Biography / Drama
Tagline: Your great adventure on Alaska.
Plot Outline / Sinopsis: After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.

Basada en el bestseller de Jon Krakauer, basado en hechos reales. Narra las aventuras de Christopher McCandles, un joven de 24 años que tras graduarse en la Universidad Emory de Atlanta y donar a Oxfam los 24000 dólares que tenía para estudiar derecho, decidió renunciar a todas las comodidades de la vida moderna y emprender un viaje que lo llevaría al monte McKinley, en Alaska

Cast: Emile Hirsch (Christopher McCandless); Marcia Gay Harden (Billie McCandless); William Hurt (Walt McCandless); Jena Malone (Carine McCandless); Brian Dierker (Rainey / Marine Coordinator); Catherine Keener (Jan Burres); Vince Vaughn (Wayne Westerberg); Kristen Stewart (Tracy); Hal Holbrook (Ron Franz)
Runtime:USA:140 min
Country:USA
Language:English / Danish
Official Website:
USA: www.intothewild.com
Spain: www.haciarutassalvajes.es
Trivia:
Sean Penn waited 10 years to make the film to make sure he had the approval from the McCandless family.
The role of Jim Gallien, the Alaskan who gave Chris the rubber boots in the opening scene, is played by the real Jim Gallien.
The film was shot entirely on location.
Awards:Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 7 wins & 24 nominations

Academy Awards, USA 2008
+ Nominated Oscar Best Achievement in Editing (Jay Cassidy)
+ Nominated Oscar Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Hal Holbrook)

American Cinema Editors, USA 2008
+ Nominated Eddie Best Edited Feature Film – Dramatic (Jay Cassidy)

Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards 2008
+ Nominated Critics Choice Award Best Actor (Emile Hirsch)
+ Nominated Best Director (Sean Penn)
+ Nominated Best Picture
+ Nominated Best Song (Eddie Vedder for the song “Guaranteed”.)
+ Nominated Best Supporting Actor (Hal Holbrook)
+ Nominated Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener)
+ Best Writer (Sean Penn )

Chicago Film Critics Association Awards 2007
+ Nominated CFCA Award Best Picture
+ Nominated Best Screenplay, Adapted (Sean Penn)
+ Nominated Best Supporting Actor (Hal Holbrook)

Cinema Audio Society, USA 2008
+ Nominated C.A.S. Award Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Motion Pictures – Edward Tise (production mixer), Michael Minkler (re-recording mixer), Lora Hirschberg (re-recording mixer) –

Costume Designers Guild Awards 2008
+ Nominated CDG Award Excellence in Costume Design for Film – Contemporary (Mary Claire Hannan)

Directors Guild of America, USA 2008
+ Nominated DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures (Sean Penn)

Golden Globes, USA 2008
+ Won Golden Globe Best Original Song – Motion Picture (Eddie Vedder for the song “Guaranteed”)
+ Nominated Golden Globe Best Original Score – Motion Picture (Michael Brook, Kaki King, Eddie Vedder)

Gotham Awards 2007
+ Won Best Film – Sean Penn (director/producer), Art Linson (producer), William Pohlad (producer) -
+ Nominated Breakthrough Award (Emile Hirsch)

Grammy Awards 2008
+ Nominated Grammy Best Song Written for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media (Eddie Vedder for the song “Guaranteed”)

Mill Valley Film Festival 2007
+ Won Mill Valley Film Festival Award Best Actor (Emile Hirsch)

Motion Picture Sound Editors, USA 2008
+ Nominated Golden Reel Award Best Sound Editing in Feature Film: Music

National Board of Review, USA 2007
+ Won NBR Award Best Breakthrough Performance – Male (Emile Hirsch)

Palm Springs International Film Festival 2008
+ Won Director of the Year Award (Sean Penn)

Rome International Film Festival 2007
+ Won R.I.F.F. Jury Award (William Pohlad, Art Linson, Sean Penn)

Satellite Awards 2007
+ Nominated Satellite Award Best Original Song (Eddie Vedder for the song “Rise”)

Screen Actors Guild Awards 2008
+ Nominated Actor Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture (Brian Dierker, Marcia Gay Harden, Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Jena Malone, Kristen Stewart, Vince Vaughn)
+ Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role (Catherine Keener)
+ Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role (Emile Hirsch)
+ Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role (Hal Holbrook)

São Paulo International Film Festival 2007
+ Won Audience Award Best Foreign Language Film (Sean Penn)

Writers Guild of America, USA 2008
+ Nominated WGA Award (Screen) Best Adapted Screenplay (Sean Penn)

‘Hacia rutas salvajes’, Sean Penn se hace un director serio
(Por Antonio Toca, www.blogdecine.com)

Cómo empezar la crítica de una película como ‘Hacia rutas salvajes’ (Into the Wild), que me ha dejado completamente fascinado. Podría empezar por decir que las dos horas y media que dura se me pasaron sin darme cuenta, a pesar de ciertos altibajos de la misma. Que la dirección de Sean Penn de los actores es muy buena, les pone la cámara y les deja actuar (soberbios Catherine Keener y Hal Holbrook, este último con una merecida nominación con un papel de 10 minutos). Y que el mismo Sean Penn, también guionista, acierta convirtiendo la película en una “road movie”.

Sin embargo, sé que la película no dejará indiferente. A otros muchos les resultará aburrida y un panfleto de ideas utópicas e imágenes hipnóticas, que no ayudan en nada. Pero la historia de ese extraño personaje, Christopher McCandless y su aventura, la misma en la que renunció a todo con tal de vivir una experiencia única, es cuando menos fascinante.

Sin duda alguna esta película no hubiera sido posible si no hubiera ido el nombre de Sean Penn unido a ella. E incluso, quiero creer, que con 20 años menos, el mismo hubiera interpretado al personaje principal. Por eso Sean Penn, es principio y fin en ‘Hacia rutas salvajes’. La ha hecho al margen de taquillas. La ha hecho para contar una experiencia, por disfrute, poniendo la mano y preguntando si te quieres subir al viaje que propone.

Y es una apuesta difícil, porque se conoce el final de la misma y lo complicado es desarrollar toda la historia desde ese punto de partida. De ahí el acierto del planteamiento de una “road movie”, de un viaje iniciático hacia un final trágico.

Aquellos que lo logren y no piensen en ciertos tiempos muertos que frenan el desarrollo de la película, querrán luego pensar en lo visto y plantearse en lo que logró McCandless renunciando a todo (como muestra la cara de felicidad en la fotografía del final de la película, aun sabiendo que va a morir). Con esa defensa de la libertad a decidir qué hacer con tu vida, junto a la de la naturaleza salvaje (la película está rodada en parajes naturales), que es lo que nos quiere mostrar Sean Penn, sin tomar partido (se puede pensar que McCandless fue un estúpido idealista, que no calculó las consecuencias de su viaje a Alaska, ni los fallos que cometió que podrían haberle salvado de la muerte a la que se había encaminado). Muestra la vida del protagonista durante esos dos años de aventura, y que seamos nosotros los que decidamos tomar partido, ante un personaje hipnótico, que atrapa, porque tiene la enorme virtud de saber escuchar, hasta hacerte creer su aventura. Es decir, si entras, acabas atrapado.

En eso ayuda la excelente interpretación de Emile Hirsch, llevado de la mano por un maestro como Sean Penn, tan involucrado en el papel, que uno termina por pensar que él es Christopher McCandless, en una transformación psicológica y física asombrosa, que pone a este actor, del que uno pensaba era pasto de tristes comedias universitarias, en alguien a tener muy en cuenta (me cuesta entender que Viggo Mortensen sí esté nominado, y Emile Hirsch no, por mucho que defienda a Promesas del este).

No puedo negar que me he posicionado claramente a favor de esta película, que demuestra que Sean Penn es un cineasta total que ahora sí hay que tener en cuenta (como apuntaba en ‘El juramento’, pero sin alcanzar la calidad de este trabajo), simplemente porque tiene un material de calidad en el que cree y así lo elabora. Se perdió un futuro gran novelista con McCandless, como así demostró tanto el artículo que escribió Jon Krakauer como la propia novela en la que bebe la película. Por eso estamos ante cine de compromiso. Para pensar. De espaldas a la taquilla. No palomitero. Al que seguramente le sobre metraje, pero que en el fondo es cine necesario y agradecido.

ACTUALIZACIÓN: Parece mentira que me haya olvidado, siendo un fan de Pearl Jam, y por añadidura de Eddie Vedder. La banda sonora es espectacular, con la voz grave de Eddie Vedder dándole un buen peso a la película. Tiene un par de canciones que se te quedan grabadas, pero la Academia de Hollywood no pensaba lo mismo y ha ido a lo tradicional. Una lástima, porque el CD con la banda sonora merece apuntarse para próxima compra (Gracias, Dr. Strangelove).

Mother Nature’s Restless Sons
By CHARLES McGRATH, Published: September 16, 2007
Source: www:nytimes.com

IN the spring of 1992, after vagabonding around the country for two years, Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old Virginian and Emory graduate, hitchhiked to Alaska and set off into the wilderness with little more than a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound sack of rice. Not far from the Teklanika River, he set up camp in an abandoned International Harvester bus, a 1940s relic of the Fairbanks City Transit System. He lived there for four months, from late April to late August, before finally starving to death. When his body was discovered in September, he weighed only 67 pounds.

Exactly what happened is something of a mystery. Some Alaskans believe that Mr. McCandless was a hopeless tenderfoot with no business being alone in the wild. Others speculate that Mr. McCandless, who had burned or given away all his money, cut himself off from his family and renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, was mentally unbalanced.

Jon Krakauer, in his best-selling book about Mr. McCandless, “Into the Wild,” argues that he had sufficient skills to survive but might have inadvertently poisoned himself by eating the seeds of the wild potato plant. Mr. Krakauer’s book also suggests that, far from being deranged, Mr. McCandless was a hero in the tradition of Jack London and Thoreau: a solitary quester, an explorer of his own interior landscape, in search of a more authentic relation to the natural world.

The Krakauer view has prevailed among a small band of pilgrims who over the years have visited the bus and made it an informal shrine, keeping everything there much as Mr. McCandless left it and adding their own written tributes. The place, 22 miles from the nearest road, is apt to become a full-fledged tourist attraction after the opening on Friday of “Into the Wild,” a deeply affecting movie version of the Krakauer book, with cinematography so beautiful it makes the Alaskan landscape seem seductively otherworldy.

The movie was written and directed, and even partly filmed, by Sean Penn, who invested the project with some of the same testy singleness of purpose he has recently brought to his political activism, his reporting stints in Iran and Iraq, his jeep tour of Venezuela with Hugo Chávez. That Hollywood might not be wild for a movie about a guy who slowly turns himself into a cadaver did not deter Mr. Penn for an instant.

“The place is like nature on steroids,” he said in July, recalling the first time he visited the bus and its surroundings. This was at a dinner given by Paramount, the movie’s distributor. Earlier, Mr. Penn, wearing a dark suit and tie, his hair brushed back in a bristle, had introduced a screening of “Into the Wild,” and watching other people watch it made him so nervous that he kept ducking out for a smoke.

He was still tinkering with the film, he said, after cutting it from almost five hours to two and a half. People who had seen a version just a month earlier said this one was already subtly but significantly different.

It took Mr. Penn years to get the film made, and in many respects the process became a mirror of Mr. McCandless’s own stubborn quest. Mr. Krakauer’s book has an autobiographical section in which he says that he was drawn to Mr. McCandless’s story because as a young man he too was a solitary, rebellious risk-taker.

Mr. Penn has left out the Krakauer reflections, but in talking about the movie he every now and then manifests an almost ornery intensity. You sense that he also saw — or wanted to see — a kind of alter ego in Mr. McCandless, someone who refused to conform to the system and embraced the world on his own terms.

Mr. Penn read “Into the Wild” not long after it came out in 1996, he said recently over the phone, and when he reached the last page, he turned back and started all over again. Right away he knew he wanted to film it. “If you want to know what it was about the book that hit me, I don’t mean to sound catty, but that’s what the movie is all about,” he said a little impatiently.

He was not the only filmmaker interested, and like the others he approached both Mr. Krakauer and Christopher McCandless’s parents, Walt and Billie, who were understandably ambivalent about the idea of a movie based on their son. In the book the McCandlesses come across as an unhappy, frequently quarrelsome couple, of whom their son angrily disapproved. One of the things that caused Christopher to break with his parents, it turns out, was his discovery that his father had not only been married before, but also had had another child with his first wife after Christopher was born.

Mr. Penn was eventually chosen among the suitors. He said he thought he “had an advantage over the others because I never mentioned money.” Then, just as he was preparing to fly to Virginia to complete the deal, Billie McCandless got cold feet. “It all came down to a dream she’d had,” Mr. Penn explained. “All of a sudden she didn’t want to be part of it.”

It was 10 years before she changed her mind, and during that time Mr. Penn had to abandon his original casting plan. He had imagined Leonardo DiCaprio as Mr. McCandless and Marlon Brando as Ronald Franz, a retired Army man and widower whom Mr. McCandless befriended shortly before leaving for Alaska. In the movie Hal Holbrook portrays Mr. Franz, and Mr. McCandless is played by Emile Hirsch, who had to lose 40 pounds — almost a quarter of his body weight — to appear sufficiently skeletal at the end.

He also had to shoot rapids in a kayak, something he had never tried before; float naked in a freezing stream; and not flinch when an enormous grizzly passed within inches of him. (The bear was supposedly trained, but there were sharpshooters on the set just in case.) Besides physical stamina, Mr. Hirsch brings to the part a kind of loopy charm, in one scene talking directly to an apple he’s eating, and the performance suggests that Mr. McCandless might have been less of a weirdo than an innocent, even a secular saint of sorts, who had a transforming effect on the people he met in his wanderings.

To make the movie, Mr. Penn installed a replica of the bus in the Alaskan town of Cantwell, about 50 miles from where Mr. McCandless died, and took some other liberties with the book. But not many. The movie is in most ways painstakingly faithful to Mr. McCandless’s story, and to how he must have seen Alaska. The film marshals an immense cast of wildlife, some trained, some not: eagles, moose, bears, reindeer, wolves, bugs and even maggots.

From the beginning Mr. Penn was determined that the movie needed to be shot entirely on location. With breaks because of weather and for Mr. Hirsch to diet, filming took eight months. The crew in effect retraced Mr. McCandless’s journey, traveling to the Gulf of California; to Carthage, N.D., where Mr. McCandless worked for a while harvesting grain; to the Grand Canyon; the Arizona desert; the Salton Sea in the California desert; and a weird place known as the Slabs, near Niland, Calif., where drifters and wanderers live on the concrete foundations of an abandoned airbase.

There are documentary-like scenes of threshers harvesting wheat, of cars barreling past on the highway, of trains clanking through rail yards. More even than the book, the movie takes on the quality of the epic American road trip — of Steinbeck and Kerouac discovering the heartland — and Mr. Penn and his crew appear to have caught the bug themselves.

“I was really glad not to be the logistician on this,” he said. “It was a very difficult shoot, and I had a lot of unusual demands.” Probably even harder than being the logistician was being the banker. At one point the production ran short of funds, and Mr. Penn had to kick in some of his own, though he was at pains to say that the studio had been extraordinarily supportive.

Mr. Penn also did a lot of his own camera work, standing waist deep in water sometimes, and the look of “Into the Wild,” whose cinematographer was Eric Gautier, owes something to two Penn mentors, Terrence Malick (who directed him in “The Thin Red Line”) and Clint Eastwood ( who directed him in “Mystic River”).

Wherever possible, to add authenticity, he included real people in his scenes. The naked hippies cavorting near the Slabs are genuine naked hippies. The beatific preacher who takes Mr. Hirsch and Mr. Holbrook to his hilltop shrine, is a well-known local figure, so caught up in his sermonizing that he may not have fully comprehended that he was appearing in a movie. In one of the most affecting scenes, Christopher is about to call home from a pay phone but winds up giving his last quarter to an elderly gent who appears to have an even more urgent need to get in touch with his estranged family. The older man is played, with winning directness, by a local man Mr. Penn discovered one night in a casino.

A scene Mr. Penn cared about a lot was one in which Christopher kayaks through some rapids in the Grand Canyon on his way to the Gulf of California. In the book Mr. McCandless paddles a canoe, not a kayak, and puts in below the last stretch of rapids. But Mr. Penn thought that kayaking through white water would demonstrate the character’s feeling of exhilaration and adventure, his almost mystical belief in his own abilities.

That Mr. Hirsch had never done such a thing and was scared half to death only made it better. To reassure Mr. Hirsch that he wouldn’t drown, and perhaps to assert his own physical self, Mr. Penn shot though the rapids first, even though he too had never done it before. Describing this part of the filming over dinner, he made it sound a lot like Outward Bound.

The music for the film was also Mr. Penn’s idea. “I deliberately underwrote parts of the script because I felt that the music and the lyrics would tell part of the story,” he said. “I liked a lot the way that works in ‘The Graduate’ and in Hal Ashby movies like ‘Harold and Maude.’ ”

His original notion was to use several different singer-songwriters, but while watching Mr. Hirsch’s performance, he said, he started hearing Eddie Vedder’s voice. He showed a rough cut to Mr. Vedder, who responded with a score that is big and soulful. It plays in the background during what is perhaps the movie’s oddest feature: chapter headings that appear periodically, as if in an old-fashioned novel (“Chapter 3: Manhood”).

Mr. Penn said he had debated about whether or not to use flashbacks and voice-overs (he employs both, and also quotations from Mr. McCandless’s journals), but he knew from the beginning that he wanted the headings. “What moved me about the story was I felt this kid had furnished himself with a very full life in a short time.” he said. “He lived all the chapters, in a way that very few people do.”

Correction: September 23, 2007
An article last Sunday about the film “Into the Wild” misidentified the location of Carthage, the city where the protagonist harvested grain. It is in South Dakota, not North Dakota. Also, the article referred incorrectly to the film’s release. It opened on Friday; it does not open this week.

The Cult of Chris McCandless (Source: www.mensjournal.com)

Fifteen years after an enigmatic 24-year-old walked Into the Wild, the site of his death has become a shrine. As Hollywood weighs in with a portrait of the young man as a saintlike visionary, has the truth been lost? Inside the strange life and tragic death of “Alexander Supertramp.” –Matthew Power

Fifteen years have passed: 15 howling Alaska winters and 15 brief frenzied summers, and the ancient bus on the Stampede Trail still rusts in the wilderness, almost exactly as Chris McCandless left it. Twenty-two miles from the nearest road, shaded out by alder and black spruce on a moraine rise above a creek, the green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester looks surreally out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization. The bus doesn’t at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero. It doesn’t look to be the sort of place that would inspire a best-selling book, much less a major motion picture. But that’s exactly what it is.

Fireweed and wild potato grow up in the wheel wells. On the side of the bus fairbanks 142 is still legible in paint that has been bleached and scoured by the seasons. A few bullet holes have starred the windows; whether they were fired out of anger or boredom is unclear. Other than that, the people who have made the trek out here, out of respect or superstition, have left the site largely untouched. The vertebrae of the young moose McCandless shot lie scattered. The bones, and a smattering of feathers, add to the spooky aura of a charnel ground. Inside, near an old oil-barrel stove, McCandless’s jeans are neatly folded on a shelf, knees patched with scraps of an old army blanket, seat patched with duct tape. And the bed is still there too, springs and stuffing bursting from the stained mattress, as if a wild animal’s been at it. The same bed where they found his body.

It was a haunting tale, capturing the imagination of the country. September 1992, deep in the bush of the Alaskan interior northeast of Mount McKinley, in an abandoned bus on a disused mining trail, the decomposed body of a man was found by a moose hunter. The remains weighed only 67 pounds, and he had apparently died of starvation. He carried no identification, but a few rolls of undeveloped film and a cryptic journal chronicled a horrifying descent into sickness and slow death after 112 days alone in the wilderness. When the man’s identity was established, the puzzle only deepened. His name was Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate, star athlete, and beloved brother and son from a wealthy but dysfunctional East Coast family. With a head full of Jack London and Thoreau, McCandless rechristened himself “Alexander Supertramp,” cut all ties with his family, gave his trust fund to charity, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that brought him to Alaska, that mystic repository of American notions of wilderness, a blank spot on the map where he could test the limits of his wits and endurance. Setting off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice, McCandless hoped to find his true self by renouncing society and living off the land. But, as Craig Medred would note in the Anchorage Daily News, “the Alaska wilderness is a good place to test yourself. The Alaska wilderness is a bad place to find yourself.” No one ever saw McCandless alive again. Fifteen years later his story continues to resonate as a quintessentially American tale, and its hero has assumed near mythic status, blurring the lines between living memory and the creation of a legend.

When writer Jon Krakauer first heard McCandless’s story, he later told a reporter, “the hair on my neck rose.” Krakauer’s profound empathy for his subject and obsessive research yielded Into the Wild, a heartbreaking portrait that has sold more than 2 million copies and become the authoritative version of the McCandless story, around which all discussions are framed. In Krakauer’s telling, McCandless represents the human urge to push the limits of experience, to live a life untouched by the trappings of culture and civilization. Now that portrait has been taken up by the ultimate mythologizer: Hollywood. The film, to be released in September, was written and directed by Sean Penn and filmed on location in the many places McCandless traveled.

Woven through with the timeless themes of self-invention, risk, and our complex relationship to the natural world, the enigma of Chris McCandless is once again being debated, more vociferously than ever. Was his death a Shakespearean tragedy or a pitch-black comedy of errors? What impact has the tale and its renown had on our perception of Alaska? And perhaps most tantalizingly: Did Krakauer, and now Penn, get key parts of the story wrong?

From almost the moment he was found, the meaning of Chris McCandless’s life and lonely death has been fiercely argued. The debate falls into two camps: Krakauer’s visionary seeker, the tragic hero who dared to live the unmediated life he had dreamed of and died trying; or, as many Alaskans see it, the unprepared fool, a greenhorn who had fundamentally misjudged the wilderness he’d wanted so desperately to commune with. If the cult that has grown up around McCandless is any indication, we want the romantic portrait to be true: that he made a series of small mistakes that compounded in disaster. But the truth doesn’t always conform to Hollywood’s ideals.

The eerie quiet at the bus, broken only by the drone of mosquitoes and the rustling of alder leaves, would be more unsettling were it not for the presence of Brent Keith, a local hunting guide who has driven me out to the bus on his six-wheeled Polaris Ranger ATV. I feel relieved to have the burly 38-year-old Alaskan here, wearing a “Team Glock” hat and carrying a 10mm on his hip to prove it, plus a satellite phone and a six-pack of Moosehead behind the seat. On the way to the bus, a two-day hike from the nearest road, we spotted enormous bear tracks, and Keith had told me about dropping a charging grizzly from 15 feet away.

Images at the bus / Imágenes del autobus

To reach the spot where McCandless died we forded two rivers, the Savage and the Teklanika, the latter milky with glacial till and running so high and swift it had come up to our seats when we plowed through, nearly drowning the air intake on the Ranger. As he steered into the rushing water, Keith had shouted to me over the straining engine, “You know what the state motto of Alaska is? ‘Hold my beer and watch this!’ ” An even fiercer torrent had prevented McCandless from hiking out when he tried to leave the bush in July of 1992.

On the way in we’d come across Kevin and Rob Mark, brothers from New Jersey, who were hiking two days back to the trailhead after staying a night at the bus. They had read Krakauer’s book and wanted to see if they could make it out on foot, to gain some sense of what McCandless had endured. “It was a great adventure getting out there, but crossing the river was terrifying,” Rob told me. They were both knocked down and nearly carried off in the swift icy water of the Teklanika.

A year younger than McCandless would have been today had he lived, Keith has a distinctly Alaskan viewpoint on his death, unsentimental and unswayed by romanticism. He points to a clear pool in a stream not 50 feet from the bus, in which dozens of foot-long grayling swim against the current. “You could practically shovel those out with a spruce branch,” he tells me. “And I just don’t get why he didn’t stay down by the Teklanika until the water got low enough to cross. Or walk upstream to where it braids out in shallow channels. Or start a signal fire on a gravel bar.” He peers inside the bus and shakes his head at what he sees as a greenhorn in over his head who had retreated to the only sign of civilization for miles when he realized he couldn’t make it. “Tough enough to live out here without trying harder,” he says. “We’re hard up for heroes if that’s what it takes — some guy who starved to death in a bus.”

The majority of Alaskans share some version of the opinion that McCandless was deeply out of his element. Medred, the outdoors columnist for the Anchorage Daily News, believes that he was suffering from schizophrenia and compares him to Timothy Treadwell, the unstable filmmaker and bear enthusiast who (along with his girlfriend) was killed and eaten by a grizzly in Katmai National Park in 2003. “McCandless didn’t need the wilderness,” he says. “He needed help.”

Alaskans fault Krakauer for romanticizing McCandless, thereby encouraging others to model themselves after his life. Before the film has even been released, it has become common to blame Hollywood for further glamorizing a senseless tragedy. As Dermot Cole, a columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, puts it, “To sell the story, they’ve made it into a fable. He’s been glorified in death because he was unprepared. You can’t come to Alaska and do that.”

Butch Killian, one of the moose hunters who discovered McCandless’s body in September 1992, considered it just another day in the bush and doesn’t understand why such a big deal has been made out of the story. He told me he had never read the book and had no idea that it had been a bestseller, that thousands of people had felt a deep identification with Krakauer’s portrait of McCandless. “I don’t know what his problem was, but it wasn’t surviving. If he’s a hero, he’s a dead hero.” Killian doesn’t think that a visit to the site will provide many answers. “So many people have asked me to take them out there. What in the world would you want to go back there for? It’s nothing but an old bus.”

Old bus or no, Fairbanks 142 has become something of a reliquary, a shrine to which many have come seeking understanding: of McCandless, of the wilderness, of themselves. A memorial plaque to McCandless is screwed to the inside of the bus, bearing a message from his family that ends with the phrase “We commend his soul to the world.” Inside a beat-up suitcase on a table are a half-dozen tattered notebooks. The first entries, from July 1993, in red pen on paper yellowing with age, are personal notes from his parents. They visited the site with Jon Krakauer by helicopter. Krakauer also left a note: “Chris — Your memory will live on in your admirers. –Jon”

And those admirers came: The dog-eared notebooks are filled with hundreds of entries from pilgrims who traveled the arduous 22 miles out to try to feel some connection with the McCandless spirit. They came by snowmobile, dogsled, mountain bike, and mostly by foot, usually taking two days to hike the boggy, mosquito-plagued trail and ford the freezing rivers. They came from across the U.S. and from as far as Bulgaria, Finland, and the Czech Republic. They came because there was something about the story, and about Alaska, that drew them there.

Together the entries form a chorus of voices, some questioning, some praising, all trying to wring some meaning out of his story, and by extension, their own lives:

I am 20 years old and feel a kinship with Chris
This is God’s country and a beautiful place to leave this world
We shouldn’t Romanticize or canonize him
What went on here, at this bus, transcends the ordinary and mundane
Chris was completely awake to life for the first time in many years I am crying
Chris may have fucked up, but he fucked up brilliantly
he found the serenity of the spirit that most die without
pray for Chris’s critics
There is something about Alaska that changes you
You go your way — I’ll go your way too.

That last line, from a Leonard Cohen poem, was written by Sean Penn, when he visited the bus in August 2006. Penn had been trying to bring Krakauer’s book to the screen ever since first picking it up years ago. “The cover intrigued me so I bought it, went home, and read it straight through. Twice,” says Penn. “I started trying to get the rights from then on.” Ultimately he wrote the screenplay, directed, and helped produce the film himself, shepherding the movie through every step.

In an age of digital shortcuts and studio interference, Penn refused to compromise, insisting on filming in the places McCandless had been. Into the Wild takes place in Alaska, and it would be filmed in Alaska. It followed McCandless to locations as far-flung as the Salton Sea in the California desert and Carthage, South Dakota, where the film’s production crew doubled the size of the town. “It just felt like the only way to make the movie. That’s all,” says Penn. “It always felt worth the sacrifice.”

Alaskans often shake their heads at misrepresentations of their state in the media, and there is a fair bit of anticipatory skepticism about the movie. Dave Talerico, the mayor of Denali Borough (population 2,000, and roughly the size of Maryland), grew up in Roslyn, Washington, the stand-in for the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, in the show Northern Exposure. So he wasn’t surprised when Penn decided to shoot the Alaska scenes 50 miles south of where McCandless actually died, in the tiny town of Cantwell, where the landscape conformed more readily to the Hollywood vision of the Last Frontier.

“What I don’t understand with all these books and movies,” Talerico tells me, “is why they don’t tell the stories of the people who survive. The ones who have forged a life here?”

Cantwell lies on the Alaska Railroad line just south of Denali National Park. Filming at the bus was too remote for the technical demands of a movie shoot; the Alaska Range lies low and distant on the horizon. Cantwell, by contrast, is right next to the buttress of mountains that form Denali’s foothills. It’s a picture-perfect vision of the Alaskan wilderness — a stark contrast from the grim, swampy, mosquito-swarmed site of McCandless’s death.

It was probably an inevitable irony that, despite its best intentions, a production from the lower 48 would have some of the same difficulties in the Alaskan interior as its subject. Wayne Westerberg, a friend, the recipient of the postcard in which McCandless announced that the boy was walking “into the wild,” was hired as a consultant and then as a union truck driver for the production. “There were lots of logistical problems shooting on location,” says Westerberg, a former grain-elevator operator who is played by Vince Vaughn in the film. “We had to drive through four feet of water just to get between base camp and the shoot. We swamped a lot of vehicles and brought a lot back to the rental company in pieces.” Then there were issues with the “wildlife”: the trained grizzly stuck on the wrong side of a river who nearly needed an airlift, reindeer not moving on cue, trained wolves that didn’t act wolfy enough.

Whatever the challenges, the resulting film is visually stunning, the landscapes of the American West and far north shot in epic scope and intimate detail, the soundtrack haunted by Eddie Vedder’s throaty growl. The part of McCandless fell to 22-year-old Emile Hirsch. To match McCandless’s sinewy, athletic build Hirsch worked out obsessively, losing 26 pounds before filming even began. During the course of production, as he paced McCandless’s descent into starvation, he shed another 15, in a chilling transformation. “By the end I was down to 115 pounds,” says Hirsch. “I had no energy at all. It changes everything about you: the way you think, the way you treat others, the way you are alone.”

Alongside a busload of famous actors (Vaughn, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener), the real characters and haunts of the American underclass have cameos, giving the film at times a documentary feel. At every encounter in his nomadic wanderings — from soup kitchens and train yards to the vast landscapes of the Grand Canyon and the Alaska Range — we see McCandless flitting through people’s lives, leaving them changed before vanishing. But whereas Krakauer showed both sides of McCandless — the hapless tenderfoot and the enlightened eternal seeker — Penn presents only the latter version. His McCandless is almost Christlike. It is a deeply mythic take on a character who is largely a cipher. Clearly, in Sean Penn’s eyes, Into the Wild is a story about something profound and universal in the human spirit, a longing for freedom and a pure connection to the natural world that’s been lost.

“I’m not trying to romanticize him,” insists Penn, who has little patience for McCandless’s critics. “There are few people in Alaska who have done anything comparable to what Chris did. We’re not talking about a week with another buddy and ATVs, hunting. This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice. And he did pretty damn well. Did he make mistakes? Sure. A lot of people do. But however many miles he needed to walk to become a man was up to him. So I think he did very well by any standard, including Alaskan.”

For both Penn and Krakauer, the mccandless story became an obsession. No one, save perhaps McCandless’s own grieving family, tried harder to understand his journey and, especially, his strange death, than Krakauer, who saw something of himself in McCandless’s youthful passion for risk and remote places. Into the Wild is laid out like a meticulous legal brief in defense of a human soul. There is a mountain of evidence with which Krakauer makes his arguments: interviews, journals, photographs, historical comparisons.

The book’s Sherlock Holmes moment comes near the end. Seeking to explain why McCandless grew sick and died so suddenly, Krakauer hypothesized that he’d unintentionally poisoned himself. To supplement his fortunes shooting squirrels, porcupines, and woodpeckers, McCandless had been eating the seeds of the wild potato, a native plant whose roots have provided food for the Athabascan people for centuries. Weakened and near death, McCandless had written “Fault of pot. seed” in his journal. The plant was not thought to be toxic, but, acting on a hunch, Krakauer sent some seeds found near the bus to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks for analysis. Initial results indicated the presence of a toxic alkaloid, one that Krakauer made much of, claiming that perhaps “McCandless wasn’t quite as reckless or incompetent as he was made out to be.” It was a small but crucial mistake. As Krakauer presented it, McCandless had been poisoned by a toxin that prevented his body from absorbing nutrients, leading to his starvation.

But the book was published before the seeds’ testing was completed by Dr. Thomas Clausen, the chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department at UAF. “I was hoping it was true,” says Clausen, in his lab on campus. “It would have made a good story. But the scientific results worked against my biases. I tore that plant apart. There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I’d eat it myself.”

Of course, this flies in the face of the McCandless that the public has embraced, and Krakauer’s take has survived subsequent reprintings of the book. Now a version of his theory has made its way on-screen. In Penn’s telling McCandless is poisoned by mistaking wild potato for a similar plant, wild sweet pea, though according to Clausen’s research that plant is equally harmless. Brent Keith, my guide, suggests it was poisoned mushrooms, or giardiasis from drinking untreated water.

There’s additional evidence McCandless needn’t have wasted away. In July, a month before his death, he attempted to hike out of the bush, only to be turned away trying to cross the Teklanika. He failed to anticipate the change in water levels as the summer progressed and snowmelt increased. But as Krakauer noted — and a 9,000-word piece by Chip Brown in a February 1993 New Yorker made clear — had McCandless searched a bit farther downstream he would have discovered a manual tram over the river less than a mile from where he tried to cross, a detail missing from the film. The tragic truth may be that he didn’t find a way out of the bush, couldn’t catch enough food to survive, and simply starved to death. But no one will ever know the truth.

With the mythology that has grown up around the story, it is easy to forget that McCandless was a real flesh-and-blood person, that those who knew him and loved him are still around. Westerberg, for example, has had his life transformed by their brief friendship. He picked McCandless up hitchhiking and gave him a job working at his grain elevator in Carthage, South Dakota. The boy told him his name was Alex, and they became good friends in the nearly two years before he left for Alaska. Westerberg was the one who helped identify the body.

I ask Westerberg if he feels as if the Alex he knew has been lost.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “All this shadows the original story and clouds it to a point.”

And what would McCandless have felt about all this? “I’m sure he’s sitting up there smiling. He liked to write all those diaries,” says Westerberg. “If he wouldn’t have documented it there wouldn’t have been a story.”

McCandless clearly believed in self-mythologizing, in the power of storytelling and self-invention. Had he lived, perhaps he would have gained enough perspective to tell the story himself, rather than leaving it for others to tell. As it is, he has entered the realm of myth, and myths are shaped by those who can make use of them.

Penn, for one, doesn’t feel conflicted by presenting McCandless’s life on-screen, despite the mysteries. “I think the things that are most important are there,” he says. “It was clear Chris made the decision to go back to the world. And he left an awful lot of clues, so you go with your gut. That’s what I did.” To criticize Hollywood for being Hollywood, for taking a real story and mythologizing it, is like telling a bear not to shit in the woods. It’s what they do.

With a year-round population of around 200 and winter temperatures that frequently linger at 40 below, Cantwell is tucked in the shadow of the icy vastness of the Alaska Range. Everyone I met there spoke highly of the movie people. The production, which used almost every available ATV in town and hired many locals, was the biggest thing to happen there since the railroad came through nearly a century ago.

Penn’s production company acquired a ’40s-era International Harvester bus from a junkyard in Fairbanks, identical to the one out on the Stampede Trail, and set designers modeled it into a dead ringer of Fairbanks 142. It sits now in the crowded yard outside Gordon Carlson’s house in Cantwell, not looking terribly out of place amid rusted machinery and old pickup trucks.

Carlson, a barrel-chested Athabascan who worked as a tribal liaison on the shoot, shows me around the bus. He chuckles through a handlebar mustache and offers an unburnished appraisal of McCandless: Another fool bit the dust. “We grew up here. You learn how to make a campfire when you’re a kid. This, I didn’t think much of it at the time. That kid’s mistakes started a long time before he got here.”

And what will happen to this bus?

“Not sure what we’ll do with it. Make it some kind of attraction. Maybe a cappuccino stand. I know that sounds like we’re profiting off someone else’s story, but you do what you have to do to survive here.”

(September 2007)

Christopher McCandless biography / Biografía de Christopher McCandless
(Source: www.wikipedia.org)

Christopher Johnson McCandless (12 February 1968 – 18 August 1992) was an American wanderer who died near Denali National Park after hiking alone into the Alaskan wilderness with little food or equipment. Jon Krakauer wrote a book about his life, Into the Wild, in 1996, which inspired a 2007 film of the same name directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch.

Childhood and education

McCandless grew up in Annandale, Virginia, located in affluent Fairfax County. His father, Walt McCandless, worked for NASA as an antenna specialist. His mother, Wilhelmina “Billie” Johnson, was his father’s secretary and later helped Walt establish and run a successful consulting company.

From early childhood, his teachers noticed that McCandless was unusually strong-willed. As he grew older, he coupled this with an intense idealism and physical endurance. In high school, he served as captain of the cross-country team, where he urged his teammates to treat running as a spiritual exercise in which they were “running against the forces of darkness….all the evil in the world, all the hatred.”

He graduated from W.T. Woodson High School in 1986 and from Emory University in 1990, majoring in history and anthropology. His upper middle-class background and academic success masked a growing contempt for what he saw as the empty materialism of American society. “In his junior year he was offered membership in Phi Beta Kappa but declined on the basis that honors and titles are irrelevant,” quoted from Into the Wild. The works of Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau had a strong influence on McCandless, and he dreamed about leaving society for a Thoreau-like period of solitary contemplation.

On the road

Christopher McCandlessAfter graduating from Emory in 1990, he gave his $25,000 life savings to the charity Oxfam International and began traveling across the country, using the name “Alexander Supertramp” (Krakauer mentions WH Davies who wrote ‘Diary of a Super Tramp’ close to a 100 years ago). McCandless made his way through Arizona, California, and South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator. McCandless alternated between relatively settled periods, in which he was fairly gregarious and often worked a job, and time spent living with no money and little or no human contact, sometimes foraging successfully for food in the wild. He survived several dangerous trials during these wilderness periods, such as losing his car in a flash flood and canoeing down remote stretches of the Colorado River down to the Gulf of California. McCandless took pride in surviving with a minimum of gear and funds, and generally made little preparation.

For years, McCandless had dreamed of an “Alaskan Odyssey”: he would live off the land, far away from civilization, and keep a journal describing his physical and spiritual progress as he faced the forces of nature. In April 1992 McCandless successfully hitchhiked to Fairbanks, Alaska. He was last seen alive by James Gallien, who gave him a ride from Fairbanks to the Stampede Trail. Gallien was concerned about “Alex”, who had little gear and no experience in the Alaskan bush. Gallien tried to persuade Alex to defer his trip, and even offered to drive him to Anchorage to buy suitable equipment. McCandless refused all assistance except for a pair of rubber boots, two tuna melts, and a bag of corn chips.

After hiking the Stampede Trail, McCandless found an abandoned bus used as a hunting shelter parked on an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park ( 63°51′36.13″N, 149°24′50.62″W) and began his attempt to live off the land. He had a 10-pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic rifle, with plenty of .22LR hollow-tip ammunition, a book of local plant life, several other books, and some camping equipment. He assumed that he could forage for plant food and hunt game. Despite his inexperience as a hunter, McCandless successfully poached some small game such as porcupines and birds. Once he successfully killed a moose; despite this success he failed to preserve all the surplus meat, rather than thinly slicing and air-drying the meat of the moose, as is usually done in the Alaskan bush, he unsuccessfully attempted to preserve it by smoking it, following the advice of hunters he had met in South Dakota.

His journal contains entries covering a total of 113 separate days. These entries range from ecstatic to grim with McCandless’ changing fortunes. In July, after living successfully in the bus for several months, he decided to leave, but found the trail back blocked by the Teklanika River, which was then considerably higher than when he had crossed it in April.

On September 6, 1992, two hikers and a group of moose hunters found this note on the door of the bus:

“S.O.S. I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless. August?”

On August 12 he wrote what are assumed to be his final words in his journal “Beautiful Blueberries” He tore the final page from Louis L’Amour’s memoir, Education of a Wandering Man with the words:

“Death’s a fierce meadowlark but to die having made Something more equal to centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened or troubled And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.”

On the other side of the page, McCandless added, “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

His body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus, weighing just 67 pounds (30 kilograms). He had been dead for more than two weeks. His official cause of death was starvation.

Biographer Jon Krakauer has suggested two factors which may have contributed to McCandless’ death in August, 1992. First, he was running the risk of starvation due to to his increased activity, compared with the leanness of the game he was hunting. However, Krakauer insists that starvation was not, as McCandless’ death certificate states, the primary cause of death. Initially, Krakauer claimed that McCandless might have ingested toxic seeds (Hedysarum alpinum). However, extensive laboratory testing proved conclusively that there was no alkaloid toxin present in McCandless’ food supplies. In later editions of the book, therefore, Krakauer has maintained that a fungus Rhizoctonia leguminicola managed to grow on the seeds McCandless ate. However, there remains no evidence to support Krakauer’s theory, and all available forensic data suggests that McCandless simply starved.

Cultural legacy

Krakauer’s book made Christopher McCandless a heroic figure to many. By 2002, the abandoned bus (142) on the Stampede Trail where McCandless camped became an adventure for tourist destination. Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild, based on Jon Krakauer’s book, was released in September 2007 to widespread critical acclaim, including four stars from numerous major reviewers such as Roger Ebert. As of October 21, 2007, the film had a 81% ‘fresh’ rating on the Rotten Tomatoes film review database. In October 2007, a documentary film on McCandless’s journey by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe, The Call of the Wild, was also released. McCandless’s story also inspired an episode of the TV series Millennium, the album Cirque by Biosphere, and folk songs by singer Ellis Paul, Eddie From Ohio, and Harrod and Funck.

Unlike Krakauer and many readers of his book, who have a largely sympathetic view of McCandless, some Alaskans have negative views of both McCandless and those who romanticize his fate. Due to the fact that he had no maps, McCandless was unaware that a hand-operated tram crossed the impassible river only 6 miles from the Stampede Trail. There were also cabins stocked with emergency supplies within a few miles of the bus, although they had been vandalized and all the supplies were spoiled, possibly by McCandless himself, as detailed in Lamothe’s documentary.

Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”

Judith Kleinfeld wrote in the Anchorage Daily News that “many Alaskans react with rage to his stupidity. You’d have to be a complete idiot, they say, to die of starvation in summer 20 miles off the Park’s Highway.”

Holding a note that reads: “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!” Chris McCandless, August 1991

Esta entrada fue escrita el Jueves, 14 de Febrero de 2008 a las 11:03 am y archivada en Cinema, Thoughts. Puedes seguir cualquier respuesta a esta entrada a través del feed RSS 2.0. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o trackback desde tu propio sitio web.