When the emptiness of suburbia becomes too much to bear, a guy chucks it all for a wilderness home in Alaska.
Can you name that protagonist?
Oddly enough, if you said Homer Simpson, you'd be correct, since that happens to be the arc of this summer's "The Simpsons Movie."
Those hip to the early season Oscar-buzz, though, are more likely to identify the fellow as Chris McCandless, subject of the book "Into the Wild," vividly adapted for the screen by Sean Penn.
Jon Krakauer's bestseller has made McCandless a cult icon for a rootless generation - he graduated from college, changed his name, gave his money to charity, burned the rest, ditched his car (quite literally) and set off on an odyssey that ended with a survivalist challenge in a remote region of Alaska.
People tend to see some part of themselves in McCandless - a rebel, open-roader, wildman, back-to-the-garden greenie, activist, New Age Thoreau (he kept a florid journal). Certainly Krakauer did, noting how his own life as a solo mountain climber mirrored McCandless' dark side - brooding, aloof, impulsive to the point of being self-destructive.
In the movie, Penn gives us a substantially different view of McCandless - certainly it's a sunnier tale, and McCandless comes off as a guy who is more obviously inspirational.
Much of the difference in tone originates with Penn's decision to cast Emile Hirsh in the lead. Hirsch is an ingratiating young man with a naturally easy smile, and he makes McCandless a lighter, more optimistic presence that he was in the book.
The movie McCandless charms (sometimes heals) the people he meets - a wandering hippie couple (Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker), a rowdy grain harvester (Vince Vaughn), a lonely retiree (Hal Holbrook).
In return, almost everyone McCandless encounters offers him shelter, money, a job, a hot dog, sex, advice - something.
And this theme of hospitality and generosity helps "Into The Wild" take on a life independent of the book. It broadens from a portrait of McCandless to a landscape of back-road/off-road America, one that feels warm, authentic in its idiosyncracy and weirdly patriotic (it helps that Vaughn, Keener, Holbrook and Dierker are all good).
