MARILYN PENN; A REVIEW OF CAPTAIN FANTASTIC
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If your heroes are Noam Chomsky and Jesse Jackson, or if you’re a fan of parenting by dictatorial narcissists who retreat to the wilderness and isolate their children from society – you may enjoy Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortenson. The normally swoon-worthy and photogenic actor is buried below a massive beard so you’ll have to wait till the end to see his adorable chin but in the meantime, you can count the many ways that this movie, which should have been titled Captain Fanatic, fails to deliver.
A safe bet is that 90% of the audience does not know who Noam Chomsky is and since his birthday is celebrated instead of Christmas, it’s just plain silly that he’ d be considered a superior reformer to Jesus – son of God, for God’s sake! You may also wonder throughout the course of the film where Viggo – here known as Ben Cash – actually got the cash to buy the various knives and other weapons intrinsic to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle he has imposed on his clan. Likewise for the clothing, food, camping and climbing paraphernalia that comprise a Hollywood minimal lifestyle. As the film progresses and you discover that the missing mother has been hospitalized for mental problems, you continue to wonder who decided it was a good idea to have a hallucinatory bi-polar woman undergo post-partum episodes SIX times. Never fear, for more than half the movie, the children are as upbeat as the von Trapp family and as skillful as the Flying Wallendas. As for precocity, I can only hint that one of them will get into ALL of the top colleges in your lexicon and, in a tasteless shaming of the poorly educated schoolchildren, these kids rival the Bronte and James families combined.
Eventually, the children are brought into the real world where they encounter their ‘civilized” relatives who hardly measure up to the lofty far-left standards of the screenwriter and his creations. Since every movie requires an arc, there comes a confrontation, some meltdowns, some accusations of “I hate you,” along with a generally unbelievable happy ending to rival Mama Mia. The moral of this movie is that even leftover hippies and their progeny look better with haircuts and no one with a chin like Viggo should ever consider a beard.
If you want to test yourself on the credibility factor in this film, try substituting L. Ron Hubbard for Noam Chomsky and ask yourself whether cult tactics of indoctrination are ever appealing coming from the right. How strange that the very same methods are made to look so cute with lefties as inspiration…………..
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