Bucking convention

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This article was published 28/07/2016 (3367 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Depending on your vintage, the title Captain Fantastic may either invoke the hippie era or the dawn of the glitter era (as in Elton John’s 1975 album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy).

Go with the hippie interpretation for a movie with lots of grit and a pronounced dearth of glitter.

The film is explicitly about what used to be called the “counterculture” as embodied by Ben (Viggo Mortensen), a father who has taken himself off the grid to raise and educate his six children in the pristine wilds of the Pacific Northwest.

It had been a duty he shared with his wife. But when she dies unexpectedly (not in the manner you might think), Ben piles his kids in a school bus — naturally — to travel from the rugged family paradise to the manicured golf courses of New Mexico.

It’s all to honour his Buddhist wife’s wish to be cremated. This brings Ben in direct conflict with his father-in-law Jack (Frank Langella), a well-heeled and ruthless retiree who holds Ben responsible for his only child’s demise.

When Ben interrupts his wife’s funeral, the stage is set for a showdown. But the family unit is not as tight as Ben believes. One problem: Ben’s eldest son, Bodevan (George MacKay), is starting to feel the socially constrictive confines of being raised away from people his own age, especially after an embarrassing stab at romance in a trailer park. Another problem: Ben’s angry middle son, Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton), is feeling even more rebellious, blaming his father for his mother’s untimely death.

Writer-director Matt Ross (better known as an actor in indie fare such as Ed’s Next Move and Last Days of Disco, and the cable series Silicon Valley) studiously avoids framing the conflict with a hippies-vs.-straights dynamic we might have expected of a studio film. The very first scene of the film, a deer-hunting scene, is pretty much the antithesis of an entrée into a feel-good family comedy. If it’s a bit grim, it establishes an unconventional tough-mindedness when it comes to its portrayal of this family, complete with expletive-laden dialogue and a certain criminal cunning. (If a traffic cop gets on your bus, it’s better to present as home-schooled Christians than home-schooled hippies.)

The film also offers an often startling argument against the status quo, especially when it comes to childrearing. Ben and family have a stopover at the house of his sister-in-law (Kathryn Hahn), where his intellectually vigorous kids offer a stunning contrast to their cousins, who are video-game-addicted sluggards.

It’s kind of surprising the film’s finale is such a cop-out, a buy-in to the notion home-schooled kids are socially compromised. But at its best, it’s a film that shares attributes with its troubled hero: it’s smart, challenging and unconventionally handsome.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing