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
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