Into the Wild; September

Transposing backpacking escapades into a group email or internet blog is always a challenge. The sprawling nature of new experiences is not well suited to such restricting formats, and the seemingly endless list of ‘Wacky Things that Happened to Me’ will often bore the friends who have stayed behind, and who read of your adventures from their office cubicle. The first hour of Into the Wild is comparable to this phenomenon. Based upon a true story, it follows the journey of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who has just graduated from college and is therefore finally free to dispose of his affluent existence in favour of a lonesome trek up to Alaska. Not wanting to feel ‘chained’ to society, he donates his life savings to Oxfam, dumps his car and burns his remaining dollars, hoping that the wilderness will deliver him salvation from the insidious materialistic world he has left behind. What follows is a collage of scenes that depict his various travel experiences, and that jump through chronology to be loosely ordered in a sequence that depicts his personal maturation.

For the most part, this seemingly endless string of new experiences is exhausting. The cinematography may be breath-taking, but it’s doubtless that the film would have benefited from some far more severe editing. Its slow pace combined with the sheer volume of experience that director Sean Penn packs into this limited space is a little overwhelming. It has to be acknowledged, though, that like bathroom renovations, a history textbook or a week of exams, you won’t fully appreciate Into the Wild until it is over. It is also only with hindsight that the significance of scenes that had previously seemed arbitrary is made clear, transforming the film from a simple travelogue to a complex philosophical exploration of human nature. In the end, despite it being such hard work, Into the Wild is a profoundly worthwhile experience, and the film’s philosophical undertones are no difficult to quickly shake-off.

8.0

Australian films often have a tendency to lose themselves in the thick web of their own clichés and, when a movie is set in the 1960s on a dry wheat field, audiences can not be wholly blamed for fearing the worse. There is, however, something quite transcendental about Peter Castair’s feature debut, September, despite the story’s specific location. The film follows the lifelong friendship between two 16-year old boys – Ed (Xavier Samuel of 2:37), whose parents own and run an expansive wheat farm, and Paddy (Warwick Senior High School’s Clarence John Ryan), whose parents work of Ed’s in exchange for food and shelter. Inevitably, times begin to change, and as new laws are introduced (requiring fair pay for Aboriginal work) and as Ed’s attention gravitates towards his school’s ‘new girl’ Amelia (Mia Wasikowska), the friendship begins to fracture and eventually shatter.

September is the first film to be produced by the Tropfest Feature Program – an incentive designed to extend Tropfest’s interest in exposing emerging talent (through its short film festival) to sustaining this talent through career support for new filmmakers. Indeed, September is powered by that feeling of freshness brought to it by Peter Castair’s youthful vision. The dialogue is refreshingly (and appropriately) sparse, while the meaningful silences are plumped by poetic cinematography. Low depth of field emphasises the character drama, and the powerful performances of the young leads (who are never overshadowed by their older counterparts). Some of the hand-held camera work feels a touch misplaced but there is something quite captivating about this slowly-unfolding drama. And if you’re worried that the ‘black and white friendship angle’ will veer into didactic preaching or trite cultural commentary, have no fear, because September is far from this. The thematic undertones of this narrative certainly transcend its 1960s context, but it remains nonetheless a realistic snapshot of Australia’s past, produced with the highest level of storytelling talent and artistic integrity.

9.0