Thanks to its socialist writers, this one brings to mind the famous quotation: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
Exalted literary icon Mary McCarthy had a years-long feud with literary avatar and non-capitalist Lillian Hellman. Said McCarthy of Hellman’s oeuvre: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
While Captain Fantastic is not wholly meretricious, it is filled with so many pretentious assumptions and memes that McCarthy could have had a field day.
Viggo Mortensen, for instance, usually a sexy, serious portrayer of classic males in some distress, future or past, in one genre or another, plays the strict, affect-deprived father of six lively children. Early in the film, their mother, stricken with bipolar or some other mental disorder, dies, a suicide.
The father is living the Walden Pond life, homeschooling his active troupe of kids in the woods, raising them with what used to be a classical education in science, philosophy, medicine (sort of), literature, and languages. Esperanto is apparently one of the latter, a tongue for some reason taboo on one of the family’s rides on the rickety converted school bus they ride when they need groceries or city contact.
But though the sprach is all Trotskist (as opposed to the verboten Trotskyite) sloganeering, and the father wears a faded T-shirt reading Jesse Jackson 1969 or something, and he is too young to have even worn such a T when Jackson rode the racialist bandwagon, the kids do not – contrary to what they sprout and the father hectors anyone who asks – wear homespun, but store bought’n clothes, trendy if dowdy city folks’ notions of what hicks in the woods might wear. They don’t know what Nikes or Adidas are, but they make stealing food from grocery emporia a fun regular event, after staging faux heart attacks. Though they make a thing of organic food, and Mortensen rejects a greasy spoon diner because “they don’t serve any real food here, kids, so let’s go,” the truth is, minutes later, he’s celebrating the odious Noam Chomsky’s birthday (instead of Christmas) with a sprinkle-covered store-made cake and – here’s the thing – Redi-Whip, which is completely artificial and damaging, one figures, to the chromosomes of all concerned. He spritzes it joyously into his mouth, as if it were nectar of the gods. Fake, fake, fake.
