Viggo Mortensen
“CAPTAIN FANTASTIC” My rating: B-
118 minutes |MPAA rating: R
There’s something phony…or at least seriously muddled…at the heart of “Captain Fantastic.”
Which doesn’t keep it from being intermittently entertaining and even borderline charming.
Matt Ross’ dramedy stars Viggo Mortensen as Ben Cash, the hippie-dippie/drill instructor Dad to six kids he’s rearing deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
A typical day for these youngsters — they range in age from 5 to 17 — consists of rigorous physical exercise, survival training, hand-to-hand combat and some serious hitting the books. (And I do mean books…there’s no Internet or electricity out in the bush.)
They bathe in streams, grow food in a greenhouse and hunt the local wildlife, and at night hold family jam sessions around the campfire (Ben plays a mean guitar, not to mention the bagpipes).
Ben is what you might call a left-wing survivalist. He’s convinced of the immorality and uselessness of most modern society, and has trained his kids to parrot his views. The family doesn’t celebrate Christmas; the big day on their calendar is Noam Chomsky’s birthday, which Ben marks by presenting each of his offspring with their own very wicked-looking hunting knife.
They’re like a military unit, moving in perfect harmony whether running down a deer or shoplifting groceries.
Just because they’re growing up in the boonies doesn’t mean the Cash kids are intellectually deprived. The youngest of them can recite the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, and the 12-year old is reading Middlemarch. The oldest, Bodevan (George MacKay), has a handful of acceptance letters from Ivy League schools; he’s trying to decide when to inform his father of this latest triumph (since it will mean leaving the fold).
Where is Mom, you ask? We never see her — alive, anyway. We learn that she’s been gone for several months for hospital treatment. And the bulk of the film consists of the clan’s road trip to Albuquerque to attend her funeral.
The opening scenes of “Captain Fantastic” are kind of idyllic — if you can ignore the fact that Ben is raising a brood largely unequipped to deal with contemporary society.
But once the family members find themselves dealing with the outside world — in the person of Matt’s sister-in-law (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband (Steve Zahn) and his wife’s very rich, very opinionated, and (one suspects) very Republican father (Frank Langella) — we realize just what fish out of water they are.
George MacKay, Viggo Mortensen
Bodevan, for instance, may be an intellectual giant and a lean, mean physical specimen, but he knows zip about girls his age. Once out on the road he hangs with a teen fox he meets at a campground, and after just a bit of kissyface he’s on his knees proposing marriage.
Is he serious? Or just putting everybody on? Hard to say.
For the first half hour or so Ross’s screenplay presents the Cash bunch as eccentric but fundamentally honest, with Dad serving as a kind of tough-love guru ministering to his brood’s emotional, physical, and intellectual needs. Eyebrows may be raised over some of Ben’s beliefs, but that’s why having a charismatic star like Mortensen (even if he’s half hidden by Grizzly Adams whiskers) is a dramatic insurance policy. We tend to overlook those nagging sensations in favor of basking in the glow of star power.
So when the kids’ grandfather threatens a custody suit so that they can live with him and Grandma, we instinctively side with Ben. He’s a loving dad, right?
Well, yeah….but. At this point Ross’s screenplay pulls a nice little switcheroo. It’s not that Ben’s behavior changes, but rather that we begin to see that Grandpa isn’t so far off base. Even Ben has to take a long hard look at himself to decide what’s best for his kids.
If only the movie had stopped there. “Captain Fantastic” utterly cops out in the end, ignoring reality and returning to the pot-hazed semi-bliss of the earliest scenes. Audiences may leave the theater feeling had. I know I do.
Still, there’s some nice acting on display from Mortensen and especially young MacKay (who more than holds his own), not to mention an old pro like Langella.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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