Just when the quaintness of Sean Penn’s sprawling and fantastic new film becomes too much, it’s tempered—like the director’s best work always is—by a disturbing, mature vision of humanity’s conflicted relationship with nature. Into the Wild’s real-life hero—and one would be hard-pressed to come up with a better epithet—is Christopher McCandless, a run-of-the-mill, upper-middle-class American guy who, after graduating from college in 1990, gave his savings to Oxfam and went on the road with nothing much to guide him but his copy of Thoreau’s Walden. Penn’s reading of McCandless’s struggle for independence is even keeled; for every teary, Littlest Hobo–like farewell, there is silent acknowledgement of McCandless’s errors, particularly the stubbornness of his self-reliance. North America’s steadily growing back-to-nature movement—or, at least, freshmen looking for something to contemplate between rounds of Hacky Sack—will find their Bible in this film. (DB)