It’s hard to imagine how the indie drama Captain Fantastic would work without Viggo Mortensen in the lead. There’s a soulfulness to Mortensen that borders on the otherworldly, making him look as dangerous as he is righteous. In Captain Fantastic he plays Ben Cash, a fervent back-to-the-land neo-hippie raising six kids up in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. He’s a sage and capable man, teaching his children to be self-sufficient individuals. But throughout the movie, writer-director Matt Ross periodically provokes the audience to ask, “Has this guy gone too far?” And the beauty of Mortensen’s performance is that Ben Cash himself doesn’t always seem to know the answer to that question.
Captain Fantastic has been smartly structured by Ross, who follows the Cash family through a period of dramatic change, broken up into distinct parts. The movie spends its first 20 minutes or so just showing life on the mountain, where Ben’s progeny — with ages ranging from preadolescent to near-adult — spend their days testing themselves mentally and physically, and then gathering around the campfire at night to share lessons, music and the food they’ve hunted and gathered. Then Ben gets word that his wife has killed herself in New Mexico while trying to recover from mental illness with her family. He piles the whole clan into a bus to go crash the funeral, but as they re-enter civilization, the Cashes find that their wilderness survival skills haven’t prepared them for a world of fast food and suburbia.
Ross, who for now is probably best known for his work as an actor on the HBO series Big Love and Silicon Valley, previously made the offbeat and beautifully crafted indie 28 Hotel Rooms, about a pair of business travelers who carry on an torrid affair in different hotels across the country over the course of several years. Captain Fantastic is very different in style and tone. Thematically, the film may remind some moviegoers of the documentary Surfwise, which caught up with the grown children of an iconoclast who tried to keep them off the grid. And in plot and approach, Captain Fantastic is a lot like Running on Empty, the 1988 tearjerker about a couple of fugitive revolutionaries who question whether they’ve let down their kids by forcing them into a life they never chose.
Captain Fantastic may resonate most with parents, who should identify with both Ben Cash’s desire to pass along his values and his dawning awareness that it might not be fair to keep them all up on the mountain forever. The film is filled with crowd-pleasing scenes of Ben explaining American culture to his brood, who’ve previously encountered the modern world only secondhand, via critiques in Noam Chomsky essays. It’s funny to hear the Cash kids ask diner waitresses to tell them how the chicken in the daily special was killed, and to hear Ben define “cola” for them as “poison water.” But there’s an undertone of melancholy there too, when it becomes apparent that the Cash teens don’t know how to talk to or flirt with other kids their own age.
Ross fumbles some of Captain Fantastic. As Ben’s disapproving father-in-law, Frank Langella ranges too far toward the cartoonishly villainous. Also, the younger Cashes’ personalities and abilities seem to fluctuate situationally, depending on what point Ross wants to make about the proper balance of idealism and practicality. Make no mistake: No matter how much Ben doubts himself, Ross’ movie ultimately comes down in favor of living unconventionally.
But however muddled — or unfairly stacked — Captain Fantastic’s message may be, Mortensen always comes across as in-the-moment, thinking and feeling his way through a family crisis that may be irresolvable. Ben knows he hates living down among the traffic jams and McMansions, where other parents let their children play violent video games but think they’re too young to talk about politics at the dinner table. But he also knows his life in the middle of nowhere was inspired by his late wife’s manic depression, and that he probably shouldn’t keep maintaining a lifestyle that was the byproduct of someone else’s sickness.Â
Captain Fantastic is in some ways a simplistic film — entertaining, though not especially deep. But Mortensen gives his all to the role of a man who is himself playing a part every day: the weathered leader, who strives to instill in his followers the confidence that he secretly lacks.
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