I went into seeing Into the Wild convinced that the main character was a total idiot. The movie is based on the real life (and death) of Christopher McCandless.

McCandless graduated from Emory in 1990 and traded in his life savings for a life wandering around the country on foot. He stopped along the way and made friends with all kinds of folks. It’s the classic On-the-Road story. That can’t be idiotic. Except eventually he decided to find truth by hiking on foot into the wilderness of Alaska with little more than a bag of rice, a rifle, and a book about edible plants. Ah, there’s the idiocy I’m talking about.

The story immediately made me think of Grizzly Man, the real life documentary about a guy with no special animal knowledge who decided it was his calling to commune with grizzly bears. It worked out for a little while. Actually it worked out for years. He captured his yearly adventures on video. And then he was torn to strips by a grizzly bear, and that too was captured on video. This is the truth that I expected McCandless to find in the wild.

What Sean Penn’s movie does though is present the McCandless’s story without taking sides. There’s a palpable struggle for the character against the confines of society, against the expectations of his family, against expectations. Where Grizzly Man was clearly some kind of insane, McCandless was lashing out against the constraints in his life. Sure, his way of dealing was idiotic. And he paid for it when he found out that the truth of the wilderness is kill or be killed. But the story is complex and the movie does a surprisingly great job of telling it.