

It is great acting, and more than acting.


Emile Hirsch plays him in a hypnotic performance, turning skeletal, his eyes sinking into his skull while they still burn with zeal. From his journals and other evidence, Penn reconstructs his final weeks. He lives off the land, but the land is a zero-tolerance system. He finds an abandoned bus where no bus should be and makes it his home. Ron tries, before he admits he is no longer in condition.Īnd then McCandless disappears from the maps of memory, into unforgiving Alaska. Christopher lectures this man, who has seen it all, on what he is missing and asks him to follow him up a steep hillside to see the next horizon. The most touching contact he makes is with Ron ( Hal Holbrook), an older man who sees him clearly and with apprehension, and begins to think of him as a wayward grandson. He meets such people as Rainey and Jan (Brian Dieker and Catherine Keener), leftover hippies still happily rejecting society, and Wayne ( Vince Vaughn), a hard-drinking, friendly farmer. These are people who take in the odd youth, feed him, shelter him, give him clothes, share their lives, mentor him and worry as he leaves to continue his quest, which seems to them, correctly, as doomed.īy now McCandless has renamed himself Alexander Supertramp. It was an impressive reporting achievement to track them down, and Penn's film affectionately embodies them in strong performances. In the book, Krakauer traces his movements through the memories of people he encounters on his journey. He sees himself not as homeless, but as a man freed from homes. In centuries past such men might have been saints, retreating to a cave or hidden hermitage, denying themselves all pleasures except subsistence. He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of nature. Why did he disappear from their lives, why was his car found abandoned, where was he, and why, why, why?

He had good grades at Emory his future in law school was right there in his grasp. We meet Christopher ( Emile Hirsch) as an idealistic dreamer, in reaction against his proud parents ( William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and his bewildered sister ( Jena Malone). Keep Breathing arrives to Netflix on July 28.Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source. Keep Breathing is executive produced by co-showrunners and writers Brendan Gall and Martin Gerro ( Blindspot, The Lovebirds) and Maggie Kiley ( Dr. Melissa Barrera nailed her performance in last summer’s blockbuster musical In The Heights, and we can’t wait to see her take on a grittier role in this survival series. We devoured Yellowjackets, and have an affinity for Les Stroud (the survival expert who thrills us with his grub-eating and bear-watching in the long-running docuseries Survivorman), so we’re confident that we’re going to lap up Keep Breathing.
#Into the wilderness netflix series
Keep Breathing sounds absolutely terrifying-or exactly the kind of nail-biting series we’d love to get lost in, especially as it’s set in the foreboding forests right here at home. When a small plane crashes in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, a lone woman (Melissa Barrera) must battle the elements - and her personal demons- for her survival.
