Captain Fantastic loses heart

By Jay Stone

The best scene in the eccentric family drama Captain Fantastic comes somewhere in the middle, when an off-the-grid, aging hippie named Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his brood of six wilderness children — kids who have been home-schooled in such everyday pursuits as knife-fighting, rock climbing, particle theory and left-wing politics (they can not only define “fascist,” but they can recite the American Bill of Rights from memory) — stop for a rare celebration. It’s the birthday of social critic and linguist Noam Chomsky, and it’s like Christmas in the Cash family: they’re even allowed to eat processed food. Those who aren’t sure who Noam Chomsky is, the movie implies, can go back to their lives of empty consumerism and brainless video games.

Captain Fantastic, then, is itself a somewhat off-the-grid pursuit, a culture clash between a family that lives by codes of honesty and esoterica — the children, just to torment you further, speak fluent Esperanto — and the modern world, with its facile anti-intellectualism and convenient hypocrisy. It isn’t until the final act, when the film abandons its principles for the easy co-option that it has spent the first two hours loathing, that you realize you’ve been taken for a ride.

It’s an interesting one, nonetheless. Ben and his brood live in the woods somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, eating deer that they slaughter and dress themselves, spending the days in rigorous exercises and evenings around the campfire, reading books about guns and ammunition or, perhaps, Middlemarch. Ben will stop them occasionally to quiz them on what they have learned: it’s a tale of the Lost Boys with an Ivy League education or, with Mortensen aboard, a sort of Lord of the Flies meets Lord of the Rings.

With his stringy hair and untamed beard, Mortensen is a compelling figure to both his kids and to us (a scene of full-frontal nudity adds to the legend), and any hesitation about Ben’s hard-driving education dissipates in scenes where he allows his children a full, adult scope to argue their case or dispute his rulings. One of the children will say “very unique” and Ben will ask, “Can ‘unique’ be modified?” The rest answer, as in a chorus, “No!” To cranky grammarians in the audience, it’s a kind of closed-off Utopia, the kind that just can’t last.

The dramatic turning point comes when Ben learns that his absent wife is dead, and he must pile the kids into their vehicle — a converted full-sized bus, complete with shelves of books — and drive to the funeral in New Mexico. The wild bunch is about to confront civilization, represented by Ben’s conventional in-laws. The most fearsome is his father-in-law (Frank Langella, in a familiar role of angry power), an influential man who doesn’t understand how his daughter wound up with this clown.

The road trip is a chance to get to know the kids better, and to see our world through purer eyes (“Everyone is so fat,” one of the kids observes.) In a restaurant, one child asks what “cola” is and Ben replies, “Poison water.”

But the screenplay by Matt Ross, who also directed, doesn’t provide this crew with much in the way of distinct personalities. We mainly concentrate on Bo (George MacKay), a teenager with secret dreams of fleeing this woodsy fantasy and attending university, and Rellin (Nicholas Hamilton), a pre-teen with many hidden emotional grievances against his father. Rellin, by the way, is one of the made-up names Ben and his late wife gave the children to express the individuality of each human soul. Mortensen needs every ounce of his movie-star charisma to keep you from rolling your eyes.

Like many idealistic worlds, the cloistered society of the Cash family is susceptible to sunlight, and exposure to the so-called “real world” threatens let it shrivel under the poison of compromise. That is why is it so disappointing when Captain Fantastic itself fails to live up to its convictions. Our iconic rebels —Marlon Brando in The Wild One, say, or the Jack Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces, — are better served when, like Huck Finn, they light out for the territories. Captain Fantastic, alas, turns out to be Captain Conventional.

THE EX-PRESS, July 18, 2016

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