The Call of the Wild (2007)
The Call of the Wild is a 2007 documentary by independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe detailing the odyssey of Christopher McCandless, who is best known as the subject of the novel (and later film) Into the Wild. McCandless, a self-described "aesthetic voyager whose home is the road", died on Alaska’s Stampede Trail in August of 1992. His death followed a two-year cross-country odyssey that took him from Atlanta to Arizona, down into Mexico, and from California’s Salton Sea to the streets of Las Vegas and the small town of Carthage, South Dakota, and countless places in between. In the spring of that year, the 24-year-old McCandless had made his way north to Alaska, where he lived in the woods north of Mt. McKinley for 113 days before his death by starvation.
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The Call of the Wild (2007) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Nice documentary from Ron Lamothe has him tracing the final footsteps of Chris McCandless, the twenty-something man who pretty much left all his possession behind and went on a tour of America, which ended up in Alaska where he died of starvation inside a lonely bus. McCandless has become a folk hero to many and this documentary also takes a look at that side of things. Most people are going to know this story from the feature INTO THE WILD by Sean Penn. It's funny because throughout this documentary Lamothe runs into that film crew a couple times and we even get a cameo appearance by Penn. I think some of the weakest moments here were the conspiracy theories about why certain people refused to talk about the man for this film. Apparently most had signed contracts with the film crew to where they couldn't talk so this made them unavailable here. For the most part I thought this was a well meaning film as we see McCandless' childhood home, the place he left his car and went out on his own and of course his death place. Fans of his should really enjoy this film for simply allowing them to see the real places. The film was obviously done with an extremely low budget, which is obvious by the look but this doesn't take away anything.
This disarmingly fresh, utterly engrossing - and ultimately very moving - documentary takes as its starting-point the tragic tale of Chris McCandless. McCandless was the twentysomething American adventurer whose lonely death in the Alaskan wilderness also forms the focus of Sean Penn's fictional feature Into the Wild. But as well as addressing the specific details of McCandless's controversial life (and even more controversial demise), director Lamothe covers a surprisingly expansive amount of geographic and thematic terrain as he journeys cross-county - driving, then hitchhiking - in McCandless's footsteps. Indeed, the film becomes not so much about McCandless or Lamothe (though it's certainly to some degree a portrait of both) but a more general rumination on the ambitions and limitations of the generation to which both belonged (the picture is part-dedicated to 'Generation X') and also a celebration of rural America's more eccentric backwaters.At various points Lamothe's path inadvertently intersects with that of Penn and his crew - producing some hilarious (and shaming) contrasts between Hollywood's methods and Lamothe's resolutely lo-fi approach. Not that budgetary and technical limitations make this any kind of rough-and-tumble affair: Lamothe, who provides genial, clear-eyed, articulate narration throughout, certainly knows how to frame shots and assemble a compelling narrative. He also allows himself one bit of virtuouso show-offery in a hyperkinetic 'Gen-X' montage of found footage from America's turbulent recent past, turbo-propelled by Nirvana's raucously-anthemic 'Breed'. For all its merits - and pretty much everyone I have recommended it to has responded with great enthusiasm once they tracked it down - 'The Call of the Wild' remains a bizarrely underexposed, off-the-radar title. But make no mistake - this is emphatically one of the best American documentaries of recent years.