Review: "Captain Fantastic"

“Captain Fantastic” is about a rebel who learns the limits of rebellion. Viggo Mortensen plays Ben Cash, who long ago gave up on Western civilization and is raising his six kids in the woods like primitive American Indians.

They grow or hunt their own food -- the opening scene is of his eldest son tackling a deer and slitting its throat, thereby marking his ascension into manhood. They keep some books and musical instruments to feed their minds and souls, and have an old tour bus for rare trips into town for mail, phone calls and to barter their handmade goods.

Otherwise, they’re doing the Thoreau thing to such an extreme even Bernie Sanders might find their liberalism in need of watering down. They celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday instead of Christmas, for God’s sake.

Then Ben’s wife, who has been hospitalized for some time with mental illness, dies, and he and the children undertake an adventure to attend the funeral in New Mexico and see that her last wishes are honored -- namely, cremation and flushing down the nearest toilet. Mom (Trin Miller, glimpsed only in flashbacks and visions) may have been schizophrenic and depressed, but she did not lack a sense of humor.

This means confronting modern American society, which to the kids is as alien as Jupiter, with its heffalump-sized people, violent video games and obsession with material stuff. Representing the epitome of The Man is Ben’s father-in-law (Frank Langella), a rich and connected fellow who has forbidden the motley clan from attending the burial ceremony.

The two men, representing arch extremes of the American Dream, are set up for an inevitable showdown.

If this were all there was to the movie, then I doubt I would’ve admired “Captain Fantastic” as much as I did. Sure, Mortensen has a sly, dry charisma to his performance, the kids are distinctive and authentic, and there’s plenty of comedic material in their encounters with everyday awfulness.

“What’s cola?” one munchkin asks during an impromptu (and abortive) visit to a diner. “Poison water,” Ben deadpans.

But writer/director Matt Ross -- who won the director award at the Cannes Film Festival -- takes the next, more ambitious steps. Without giving too much away, the movie shows the supremely confident Ben confronted with his own ego. He’s forced to recognize that the super-kids he’s raising are still just children, and have needs beyond the intense home-schooling and survival skills he imparts with a stern hand.

The relationship between Ben and his children is at the heart of the movie. Each child actor shines, creating a distinct personality that stands out while assimilating into the group’s commune existence.

George MacKay plays Bodevan, the eldest. (All the children have unique names, so they’re the only one of them in the world.) Though he’s smart enough to get into every Ivy League school -- applications made without his father’s knowledge -- Bo finds he knows little of the real world, especially young women.

Kielyr and Vespyr (Samantha Isler and Annalise Basso) are the red-haired voices of reason and contemplation. Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) is the tween and resident rebel, and the most eager to leave the cloistered home. Zaja (Shree Crooks) is 8 years old but can already give an insightful overview of the Citizens United Supreme Court case. Nai (Charlie Shotwell) is the youngest and most mercurial, having to be reminded to wear clothes at meals.

(Though Dad also needs such reminders, as we see in a brief encounter with Mortensen breaking his fast.)

“Captain Fantastic” is a very entertaining film, but I was impressed by its willingness to question its own premise. Here is a family with its own very radical interpretation of independence, finding that true wisdom isn’t relegated to a single place or creed.

Review: "On the Road"

I'm not quite sure how to judge "On the Road." If it existed on its own as a film, separated from any notion of the seminal Jack Kerouac book, I'd probably dismiss it as rambling and unfocused. But since the Bible of the Beats is defined by its poetic embrace of chaos -- both in life and literary endeavors -- to knock it for its quivery plot would be like criticizing a flamingo for being too pink.

Brazilian director Walter Salles and Puerto Rican screenwriter Jose Rivera previously teamed up for "The Motorcycle Diaries," a similar project about young men rambling about the countryside looking for themselves, also based on a book by a person of note (in that case, revolutionary Che Guevara). Since "On the Road" has generally been regarded as unfilmable, perhaps it required a foreign perspective to adequately capture the peculiar rhythms of this quintessential, quirky American tale.

Certainly "On the Road" has verve and gutso. In chronicling the on-again, off-again travels of Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and his best friend/muse Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) during the late 1940s, the actors and filmmakers have probably made as good a translation of the book as possible.

It's a booze-soaked, drug-riddled, sex-filled escapade with no real point other than casting off whatever yokes chain them and seeing what's out there. It captures the pure exhilaration of freedom for its own sake.

Some portions of Kerouac's  narrative are skimmed over or eliminated, while others are pumped up -- particularly those involving Dean's teenage wife (soon to be ex-wife) Marylou, played by "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart. Stewart has a vibrant, erotic presence as a wanton girl who enjoys her escapades with Dean -- including three-ways in bed with some of his friends -- even as she knows it must all come to a crashing end, with her grasping the stick's short end.

One scene, where Marylou and Dean are shaking it to a raucous jazz song as others look on, is scorching hot. Stewart's small but steamy role should do much to banish her adolescent image.

Much of the heart of the book dealt with Sal idolizing Dean as a sort of vagabond holy man, a con artist and liar who nonetheless embraced the concept of living in the moment, and inspired others to do the same. Dean is a car thief, treats women as disposable objects and leeches off his friends, but others are drawn to his audacious individuality.

Hedlund is terrific as Dean, the distilled essence of American manhood, especially his use of his voice to command and compel those around him. Riley is also good in the less showy role of the introspective writer and chronicler of the group. Tom Sturridge has an abbreviated but effective turn as Carlo Marx, a self-destructive poet who struggles with his homoerotic fixation toward Dean, which Dean uses to tease and taunt.

Viggo Mortensen turns up as Old Bull Lee, an older writer and heroin addict who acts as a mentor and father figure to Sal. It's notable that he is the one person who is instinctively disdainful of Dean's flights of fancy, recognizing them as more narcissism than revelation.

Kirsten Dunst plays Camille, Dean's much put-upon second wife; Amy Adams is Lee's mentally fractured wife; Alice Braga is an itinerant love of Sal's; and Elisabeth Moss and Danny Morgan play a recently married couple sundered by Dean's need to always be on the move.

Kerouac lovers probably know that the book "On the Road" was written in long, frenetic sessions using rolls of paper so he wouldn't have to stop typing. The movie erratically but vividly captures that freewheeling sense of losing oneself -- in the act of creation, or consumption, and even self-destruction.

3 stars out of four

Review: "A Dangerous Method"

I greatly enjoyed "A Dangerous Method," though I recognize it's not for everyone. It's a fictionalized version of the relationship between three pivotal figures in the development of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, his protégé Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Jung's who became his lover and then a pioneering psychologist in her own right.

The movie is a mixture of esoteric discussions on the nature of the human mind and depictions of tortured sexuality. One minute, the characters are debating the way their budding discipline is being ostracized by the greater scientific community; the next, they're engaging in kinky sex -- one getting whipped while she watches herself in the mirror, etc.

I found the juxtaposition of intellectual and carnal impulses delightful, but then I'm a very thin slice of the movie-going demographic -- a psychology major my first two years in college, before switching to film and journalism. "A Dangerous Method" is based on the play "The Talking Cure" by Christopher Hampton (who also penned the screenplay).

For me, it was like watching dry history from my old textbooks brought to vivid, neurotic life. A terrific trio of actors illuminate the (supposed) private lives of these stuffy figures, their collaborations and conflicts.

Others, though, may simply dismiss it as high-brow erotica with a brainy bent.

The film is directed by David Cronenberg, and if ever there were a filmmaker made to delve into the psycho-sexual labyrinths of Freud & Co., it's him. Cronenberg ("Dead Ringers") has had a career flitting between mainstream and art films, straight-out horror and deeply disquieting dramas. His movies ("Videodrome") have always had a healthy dose of id-driven fear and loathing slithering under their slick surface.

Michael Fassbender plays Jung, who in 1904 was a 29-year-old doctor practicing the still-revolutionary "psychanalysis" invented by Freud. He is assigned as a patient Sabina, a 19-year-old Russian Jew who's had thoughts of becoming a psychologist herself, but is currently suffering from crippling mental instability.

Knightley, with her willowy beauty and fierce, large eyes, makes quite an impression as Sabina, contorting her body and unhinging her lower jaw in a convincing physical manifestation of her mind's anguish. She looks like her soul is so offended by the stain of her mortal failings, it's trying to shunt off its own fleshy sheath.

Eventually Sabina's psychosis is brought under control using classic Freudian theories about sexual repression, and she becomes Jung's student. Frustrated by trying to understand sex-based impulses when she has no intimate experience herself, she initiates as affair with Jung, who is married to a very wealthy woman (Sarah Gadon).

Things really get crackling when Freud steps into the picture. Played by Viggo Mortensen with magisterial authority, Freud views himself as both a pioneer and victim, attempting to rewrite the laws of science regarding the human mind, yet stubborn in his insistence that a psychologist's role is not to cure his patients but merely help them understand themselves.

"I can assure you than in a hundred years time, our work will still be rejected," he tells Jung at their first meeting. "Columbus, you know, had no idea what country he'd discovered. Like him, I am in the dark. All I know is I've set foot on the shore, and the country exists."

The two men's philosophies clash in time, with Jung feeling constrained by Freud's view of all psychoses as sexual in origin. "There must be more than one hinge to the universe," he tells Sabina.

Again, thrilling stuff from my vantage point, but maybe not yours.

3.5 stars out of four

Video review: "The Road"

A Man. A Boy. We know they are father and son, because they call each other so, but we never learn their names. They're bedraggled and filthy, their cheeks caved in with dire hunger, as they push their meager possessions in a rusty shopping cart down an ash-strewn road, with the threat or horrendous death around every turn.

That's the bleak yet uplifting world of "The Road," one of 2009's best films -- which almost no one saw because it barely got released in theaters.

It's out on video now, and I urge people to give this spare, understated near-masterpiece a chance.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smith-McPhee star as the pair struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Taking a cue from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, director John Hillcoat ("The Proposition") underplays the performances and the dialogue. Screenwriter Joe Penhall lets the emotional drama assert itself without superfluous embellishment.

We're not even sure what turned the world into such a forbidding expanse of death and decay. Nuclear war seems likely. It's not even clear where the man and boy are heading, other than trying to escape winter's grasp and endure another day.

They meet other humans, but most of the time it's not a welcome occasion. With nothing able to grow, much of mankind has resorted to cannibalism for food. It's a zero-sum game whose only conclusion is humanity's extinction.

But among all this crushing bleakness, there is joy and tenderness that is exhilarating.

Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron have brief but powerful roles as, respectively, an ancient man they meet along the road and the wife and mother who deserted them, giving up all hope and abandoning them to her despair.

Extras are the same for both Blu-ray and DVD versions.

There is a making-of documentary and several deleted scenes, as well as a feature-length commentary track by Hillcoat.

I'm actually rather perturbed at how "The Road" was received. Its release was delayed for about a year, perhaps because in the then-new economic devastation, the studio rationalized that audiences wouldn't greet such a downbeat film with much enthusiasm.

Prove them wrong.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "The Road"

What a mystery: How can a movie so spare and bleak be so emotionally rich?

Watching the blasted, gray skies and ash-covered landscape of "The Road," you wonder how this film could be anything but a fatal downer. And yet the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning novel about a father and son navigating a post-apocalyptic wasteland is as joyous a cinematic experience I've had this year.

Director John Hillcoat, who helmed the hard-bitten Western "The Proposition" in 2005, masterfully translates McCarthy's austere prose into an understated epic of survival and human perseverance.

In detailing the quotidian journey of a Man and Boy, who are never even given names, McCarthy often eschewed even punctuation and capitalization. Hillcoat smartly mirrors this style by having his actors underplay, and letting the screenplay by Joe Penhall find its own emotional beats without garnishing them with unnecessary flourishes.

The plot, such as it is, is minimalist. Father and young son are traveling south through the desolation to escape the icy hand of coming winter. They do not have any specific destination or purpose in mind, other than continuing to live.

As in McCarthy's book, it is left unsaid what exactly turned the earth to a cinder -- although nuclear war seems probable. The results are starkly inescapable: There is no sunshine. There are no animals. Tinder-dry trees fall and the earth heaves. Nothing will grow. The only food to be had is the detritus of an orphaned mankind.

There is a way of surviving: Cannibalism. But the father refuses to even consider this, because they're the "good guys." The boy (Kodi Smith-McPhee) and his father repeat this phrase like a mantra, or a hymn.

For a good guy, the father must undertake some pretty horrific tasks. He carries a revolver with two bullets left, which he's saving in case they're caught by the roving gangs of murderers who view them as food. The scene where he shows his son how to use the gun to kill himself -- "Make sure you point up" -- is chilling.

Viggo Mortensen expertly plays the father, a man who forces himself to give up hope and the memory of his spouse in order to concentrate on keeping the boy alive. His wife (played in flashbacks by Charlie Theron) gave up her own life, literally walking away from them, because she couldn't stand the thought of life in the aftermath.

There's a spiritual element to the tale, as in the father's admonishment to his son to "keep the fire alive," pointing at his heart. In the man's sporadic narration, it's made even more plain.

"All I know is the child is my warrant. If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke," the father says.

Their journey is episodic and compelling. At one point they lose all their meager possessions and have nothing to eat, but then stumble upon a treasure trove of wealth. They come across an ancient man (Robert Duvall) along the road who is nearly blind but sees much. They are hunted, and pursue their own quarry. Anger is unleashed; blood is shed.

And yet it's in the small moments that the film finds an aching tenderness, like when the father pulls a warm blanket off a shriveled corpse and lovingly wraps it around his shivering son. It's the understatement of "The Road" that speaks loudly.

3.5 stars