BookOpinion

With a movie spurring a resurgence, “Into the Wild” (originally published in 1996) has climbed atop bestseller lists. The book is currently No. 4 on Amazon’s bestseller list. The story is taken from the journals of Christopher McCandless, who feeling disenfranchised, and inspired by the works of Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, donates his entire savings of $24,000 to charity, destroys his identification cards, and cuts all ties to family and friends…and walks away into the wilds of Alaska. Four months later, he turned up dead.

Publishers Weekly summarizes more of Into the Wild’s plot: “His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men’s Journal, retraces McCandless’s ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless’s death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods.”

The film, whose screenplay was written by Sean Penn, stars stars Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Hal Halbrook, and Vince Vaughn and was released this week. The following is a trailer for the film based on Into the Wild:

The actors talk about turning “Into the Wild” into the film:

…It took Penn a decade to realize the film after first reading the book, which made “such an impression on me,” Penn said at a press conference.

“This was a very raw, fresh wound for the family when the book first came out,” he explained.

“They felt very appreciative to Jon Krakauer for tracing steps that they weren’t capable of tracing at that time and answering a lot of questions.

“But they also felt that lightning may only strike once in terms of allowing someone into their tragedy.”

“I think they needed some more time,” he said.

The cast and crew met with the family and went to Alaska on four occasions in preparation for shooting the film, visiting the “magic bus” where McCandless’s body in a sleeping bag was found by hunters about two weeks after his death from starvation.

McCandless had lost his car in a flash flood, went kayaking alone down remote rivers, and eventually made camp at the abandoned bus along Alaska’s overgrown Stampede Trail Denali National Park.

With only a bag of rice, a hunting rifle, minimal equipment and a book of local plant life, he had hoped to live off the land, according to his journal entries covering 113 separate days.

Actor Emile Hirsch, who plays McCandless in the film, said he had first heard of his epic adventure while watching a US television news magazine when he was a child.

“I was flipping through the channels and was struck by the story of a guy with the courage to go into the wild, which for a young child was unthinkable.”

While researching the role, he said he spent a lot of time alone “to see what it was like.”

“I found that a lot of times when I was alone, a lot of the negativity that society can somehow filter down to you … really went away and I found a moral core that I think is within us all that had some of the dirt wiped off it,” Hirsch said…

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