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Review: Captain Fantastic

A father happily raises his family off the grid—until the real world encroaches.

Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic would make a nice doublebill with Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash.

On the face of it, the two films aren’t that similar. Whiplash is about a drill-sergeant-like music teacher who gets results by being abusive to his pupils. Captain Fantastic is about a Noam Chomsky-loving father who raises his kids off the grid and teaches them to greet each other with, “Power to the people!”

But look closer and there are similarities: Both the father and the teacher are authoritarian figures, with a narrow view of the world, who bully their charges into obedience. And in both cases, the filmmakers acknowledge this bullying, while secretly championing it. (In Whiplash, the bullying is more explicit and the championing more subtle—but it’s there.) Finally, both films are persuasively, passionately made and feature wonderful and engaging performances. If you’re buying what these filmmakers are selling, you’ll be all in. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t buying it.

Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) has nothing but disdain for contemporary culture, with its corporate overlords and zombified consumers. So several years ago, he and his wife Leslie went off the grid, first on a farm, then going deeper and deeper into the wild. When the film starts, Leslie (Trin Miller) is being treated for bipolar disorder in a hospital and Ben is raising his six children on his own. The oldest son, Bo (George MacKay) has just performed a coming-of-age ritual of killing a buck (with a knife), while his face-painted siblings crouch in the bushes. Later, the family will skin and cook and eat the buck, along with vegetables they keep in canning jars in the log cabin where they live. Ben home schools his children—unofficially—and teaches them several languages (it’s inadvertently telling that the kids are reading Middlemarch and Lolita and Chomsky and not works by great African or Asian writers). His philosophy of parenting is this: Teach his children to defend themselves (he buys all his kids—including the wee ones—knives); avoid all euphemism in conversation (he straight-forwardly answers questions about sex and death and other subjects deemed taboo for children); and encourage them to challenge conventional wisdom at all times.

Ben clearly loves his children. But he can be cruel. When the middle son, Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) questions the family’s celebration of Noam Chomsky Day—their version of Christmas—Ben puts him on the spot, asking him why it would make more sense to celebrate the corporatized holiday. This is a teachable moment, of sorts, but it feels confrontational, intended to humiliate, not enlighten. Tongue-tied, Rellian eventually runs off. Later, Ben teaches his children to climb a mountain. When Rellian breaks his wrist, he gets no help—or sympathy—from his father. Ben believes that his children must learn to fend for themselves.

Still, the woodland lives of the family—the children are all beautiful tow- and red-heads in fetching Coachella-esque garb—is presented idealistically. They sing songs and cavort naked and all seem to really love each other. Except for Bo, who stashes acceptance letters from all (!) the Ivy league schools under his bed, and Rellian, who is beginning to resent his father, the family is happily compliant. And then the mother dies, disrupting their world.

Leslie’s father, Jack—played by Frank Langella at his imposing, pompous best—not only disapproves of Ben’s lifestyle but blames him for Leslie’s death and threatens to have him arrested if he goes anywhere near the funeral. But the family is undeterred. Leslie was a Buddhist who wanted to be cremated (and, curiously, flushed down a toilet), so stealing her body and carrying out her last wishes becomes one of the family’s many “missions.” They pack up their Partridge-Family style bus and head out to civilization.

The removal from their forest idyll into the real world is the event that will, of course, change everything. Eventually something does happen—I won’t spoil it here—that allows for the slight possibility that Jack might be right, that maybe Ben is bad for his kids. But of course, Jack isn’t a sympathetic figure (he’s played by Dracula, for God’s sake, as my friend Meg pointed out)—Ben is. And even as director Ross acknowledges the abuse, he still clearly believes Ben is on the side angels.

On their way to the funeral, the family spends the night with Ben’s sister Harper (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband and two sons. At dinner, Ben is a disruptive force, giving his children wine, against Harper’s wishes, and defiantly discussing the uncomfortable particulars of his wife’s death. Harper pulls him aside, tells him that in her house he needs to follow her rules. He apologizes, albeit half-heartedly. The next morning provides the film’s most obnoxious scene: Harper criticizes Ben’s improvised home-schooling methods, so he summons her two video-game-hooked teenage sons from the den. “What’s the Bill of Rights?” he asks them. They gape at him, fumfer for the answer, and both guess wrong. Then he calls for his pint-sized daughter and asks her to answer. Standing proudly, her messy blonde locks falling into her wide eyes, she shows up the two teens by not just knowing what the Bill of Rights is, but by starting to recite its preamble by heart. Later, when the family bus pulls away en route to the funeral, the boys give their departing cousins the finger. Can’t say I blame them.