Captain Fantastic

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Captain Fantastic has similarities with the 1986 movie , The Mosquito Coast. Both films feature obsessed father wanting to go off the grid and live a simple life with the natural world. Viggo Mortensen gives a sincere and earnest performance. He plays Ben who lives in a log cabin in the pacific northwest woodlands with his six children. It is a back to basics life away from the modern commercial world. His kids read books, hunt and co-exit with nature. Whereas their cousins play violent video games and watch television. When Ben's wife and the kids mother Leslie commits suicide due to her bi-polar condition. The family travel to her funeral arranged by her conservative and wealthy parents. Ben's father in law Jack immensely dislikes him and his way of life. He rues that day that his daughter fell for him. Ben and the kids sort of gatecrash the Christian funeral. Leslie left instructions behind of the kind of funeral she wanted and she was a Buddhist. Writer/director loves the offbeat lifestyle of Ben's family values. Jack is the antagonist here. As one of the grand kid's mention, he has so much land around his house, it is unethical. Yet I had a touch of sympathy with Jack. I did find Ben a bit of a jerk, a know it all, someone who insists the old way of living in the past is the best and if you do not like his way it is the highway. I think the audience could feel confused as to what Leslie really wanted. After all she was mentally ill and she helped her eldest son Bodevan to gain admittance to prestigious colleges. Ben loses his rag when he finds out that his eldest son applied behind his back to these colleges. Such an elitist act was an affront to Ben's ethos. So much for free thinking and as Bodevan retorts, he knows nothing about the real world as he grew up in a forest in some kind of hippy commune where he was home schooled and had little contact with outsiders. I think Captain Fantastic goes for an easy ride, it wants to avoid difficult issues. Ben is made to look like a quirky anti establishment hero. He is just another type of bully, not alt right, just alternative lifestyle. Jack was right, Ben did come into Leslie's funeral looking like a clown.

Ben and Leslie disapproved of modern American society and live in the Pacific Northwest with their six children. In the wilderness the kids undergo a severe physical and mental training but they seem to enjoy life until tragedy strikes. Promoted as a movie that offers fair criticism both of the American way of life and of its opposite, "Captain Fantastic" is quite a disappointment. Its core message seems that Americans are fat and ignorant - which may be the case - but their opponents are brainwashed survivalists who can only exploit the society they despise so much. Ben's character, played by a remarkable Mortensen, is a bit of a bully and very arrogant. He completely disregards the fact that people live in societies, or at least in social groups and his kids are a bunch of socially inept intellectuals. The two elderly daughters and the two young kids are superfluous characters. The plot could have made with only one teenage daughter and one young kid. The others are just duplicates. I guess a little crowd was needed to give the impression of a wider social network. Only the two elderly boys have some relevance in the plot. Bo, the eldest, wants to break out and shows some interest in sex, while Rellian blames his father for mum's death - but only slightly. However, if Ben lived in the forest with only that couple of boys, it would look creepier and more lonely. Ben's lifestyle is sustainable only for the young and the fit - and the asexual. The two girls, although in full teenage bloom seem completely disinterested in sex. One can foresee their future as the Bronte sisters, fully isolated and caring for an elderly father. No member of the family shows any real grief for the death of mum. A few tears are shed, but then they are ready to sing and dance and dispose of the body in the most disrespectful way (I would not do that to my cat) Although accepted by all the most prestigious universities, Bo leaves for an obscure African country picked randomly - definitely a wise move for somebody highly intellectual and socially inept It is OK to mock Christianity and their rites, because other religions are way cooler... but why? Would they crash a funeral of any other religious community dressed like clowns and disregarding the community's social norms? Why would they bother to learn foreign languages when they live as hermits? All kids have stupid names, because they must be "unique"

Raising 6 children, three boys and three girls, in the wilderness would be hard enough. Training them to be skilled hunters, gifted at self defense and schooling them effectively would be beyond the skills of most parents. But this Dad isn't most people. His oldest son speaks 6 languages and is accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown and M.I.T. His youngest girl can recite or explain the Bill of Rights. All six children are able rock climbers and very fit. In keeping with the politics of the day they are followers of Noam Chomsky and more than just a little left of Bernie Sanders. All of this already strains credulity and is it really necessary? So, when the children and their father decide to leave their retreat in the woods to attend their mother's funeral, we are sure that there will be a culture clash. The excesses of this clash are to be expected after the excesses of the characterization of the children. The mere fact that these children grow up in the wilderness does not mean that their parents would have failed to provide any social skills whatsoever. This makes the culture clash setup less believable and true to life. If there might have been any issues that the audience is expected to think about, the way the characters are drawn detracts so much that any serious issues that could have been raised are no longer relevant. Perhaps this is the reason this movie is listed BOTH as a comedy AND a Drama. But it succeeds at neither. My long car trip to see it was really not worth the effort.

There are compelling and relevant ideas swirling around the periphery of "Captain Fantastic," but they are undermined by a terrible screenplay that gets more and more preposterous as the movie wears on. We are introduced to an absolutely unbearable family being raised by dad Viggo Mortensen as a bunch of sort of hippie survivalists. They live self-sufficiently out in the middle of nowhere, are forced to undergo family exercise regimens every day, and are taught by their father to be judgemental and morally superior to everyone who doesn't think and live exactly like them. Consumerist and capitalist America is the biggest target of their vitriol, and every a**hole remark they make or act they carry out is justified by the ambiguous belief that they are "sticking it to the man," whatever that means. Then a series of events that forces the family to interact with the real world wakes Mortensen up to the fact that he may be doing some harm in raising his children in such a fashion. I liked that the movie acknowledges the hypocrisy that this particular family peddles in. For example, they celebrate Noam Chomsky day and honor him for what a great humanitarian he is and how good he was to his fellow man, but then they create a ruse involving Mortensen pretending to have a heart attack so that they can steal from a grocery store. This is surely o.k. in their eyes because, hey, the grocery store is part of "the Man" and only fat people with bad diets buy food from there -- forget that those same people showed real human kindness in coming to Mortensen's aid when they thought he was having a medical emergency. Another example -- Mortensen is proud of his children for knowing nothing about popular culture, yet has them reading books like "Middlemarch" and "The Brothers Karamazov," which were, guess what, part of the popular culture when they were written. I guess he thinks nothing contemporary can be worth reading. The film ends in a place I could live with, with Mortensen's character recognizing that he needs to compromise, and that one need not abandon all of one's ideals because he's willing to participate in the culture around him. But before we get there, we go through the most awful series of plot developments that strain credibility beyond the breaking point. Like....the family digging up its freshly-buried mother so that they can honor her wishes to be cremated. I've been a pall bearer at more than one funeral, and caskets with dead bodies in them are HEAVY for six grown men to carry, yet this family consisting mostly of children manages to pull an entire coffin out of a six-foot grave with no equipment. Or....burning their mother's body on a bonfire while breaking into an impromptu musical number, and asking us to believe this would be a beautiful and natural moment for the family instead of the grisly nightmare that it would actually be in real life. This movie is all about one man not dealing with the reality of the world the way it is, and then the screenplay itself chooses to ignore the reality of how things would actually be just because it's more convenient and gives the director the scene he wants when he wants it. By the time the family was decorating their mother's corpse with flowers on the ride back to the wilderness (a corpse that looks beautiful, by the way), this film had lost me and I no longer cared how it ended. Movies about topics like the ones explored in "Captain Fantastic" should be made more often, but they need to be much better than this. Viggo Mortensen is receiving all sorts of praise for his performance. Maybe he was good, but who would be able to tell when the movie around him is so stupid? Grade: D

This movie challenges lots of things that we wrongfully take for granted in today's society. Mortensen is brilliant for yet another time and all the cast is simply breathtaking. The concept of the movie and the backstory were brilliant. A touching movie, heartwarming and brilliant all along. A father that although strict and sometimes military like, who's also artistic and deeply sentimental. An amazing depiction from Vigo Mortensen. Amazing. A movie that in a simple but yet elegant way depicts all the things that have altered our society and brings forth lots of the things that really matter. It makes us think about the ways we were raised and rethink the ways in which we want our children to be raised. This is a movie well worth your time. One of the best movies I have watched in 2016, by far!