Recommendation: Maybe– Worth a Redbox, but skip the theater prices.
Verdict: “Captain Fantastic” has some good laughs, but struggles to strike a balance between its jokes and emotional core. It’s not great and probably isn’t worth 10 bucks at the box office, but audiences will enjoy its charm and “fish out of water” humor. (ATTENTION: Some spoilers below).
Everybody’s all about the Earth these days, like wanting our food locally sourced and using recycled paper products, while the hipsters trip acid in the woods instead of their dorm rooms. This suggests it’s a good moment for “Captain Fantastic” to find its way into theaters. Those with an anti-establishment, return-to-the-earth mentality will love its characters’ outsider exploits, but it doesn’t offer much more than that.
Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen), lives with his six kids on an isolated wonderland in the woods. Hiker types with dreams of escaping society will drool over their Enchanted Forest home, an Instagram-ready camp, complete with organic garden, watering system and communal bunk house (sans bathroom and running water, I’d note, but charming nonetheless).
Cash’s kids follow a strict schedule, with early morning exercise routines sending them bounding through the woods, hunting, tending to plants and at night reading Marx and classic literature.
They’re a happy, loving family, content to stay off the grid until we learn Ben’s wife, the kids’ mother, has killed herself. We learn she’s been holed away in a mental hospital getting treated for bipolar disorder, her illness seemingly exacerbated by their twenty or so years in isolation.
Her father blames Ben for her death and bans the family from attending the funeral, but they head out into the world anyway. Their main intent is sticking it to the man and fulfilling their mother’s last wishes– forget a standard Christian burial, she wants to be cremated and dumped in a toilet!
Most of the film consists of jokes showing the family’s comic missteps in a modern world they know nothing about. The trailer gives you a taste of the kind of fish-out-of-water humor it loves.
I rarely laughed out loud (though I really guffawed when I learned they celebrate Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas), but it’s mostly amusing, chuckle worthy stuff, with the exception of some jokes that just don’t land. In one notable unfunny scene, the kids scare off a cop by pretending to be evangelical Christians and singing a gospel song loudly at him. Not my cup of tea, as they say.
Ben’s parenting, strange as it might seem, works on a certain level, producing outrageously smart thinkers who won’t bow down at the words “because I said so.” But the movie understands their isolation has consequences, so while their bumbling is amusing, there’s a real horror there too.
Writer/director Matt Ross has said that “Captain Fantastic” is supposed to be Ben, seeing as he attempts to be a perfect parent despite being a flawed person. I find that a mild description; saying he’s a flawed person, doesn’t accurately describe how scary he can be.
At the beginning of the movie Ben’s single-track mind is cult-leader like, a proud Marxist who exhibits real disdain for American society and passes that along to his kids. I’ve got nothing against Marxists and American society deserves a little scorn, but his hatred for all things “mainstream” makes the opening sequences of kids doing work-out regiments and killing deer creepy, not endearing. He never suspects he could be in the wrong until his kids are actively endangered by his mindset, and that in itself is terrifying.
This is made clear by their grandfather, who is both obnoxious in his detestment of Ben, but also totally right to be worried about his grandkids. The kids themselves start to feel this too, led by oldest son Bo (George Mackay, whose hilarious facial expressions are in themselves a reason to see the movie.)
Confronted with their qualms, Ben struggles with the possibility that his lifestyle may have killed his wife and screwed up his family. This conflict is the real emotional core of the movie, and it hits harder than the whole “dead mom thing,” which gets lost in the jokery of their journey.
It gets so lost, in fact, that I wish Ross had found another reason to send them out into the world. The movie would’ve worked better without it, could have focused on the “modern world vs isolated geniuses” theme it cares so much about. As it stands, I was disturbed by how her death is glossed over until we get to the scenes where the family is straight up confronted with her casket.
The ending falls flat due to all this underused emotional capital. What should be uplifting and tear-jerking, with a family honoring their lost mother, is instead bland and feels like a reversion of everything they’ve learned over the course of the movie. A lot of razzle dazzle, even a musical number! But not much heart. When the credits rolled I sighed and the woman sitting next to me said, “Did you fall asleep too?” I certainly could have.
So should you see “Captain Fantastic”? If you’re sated by woodsy Instagram-ready prettiness, some light chuckle and Viggo Mortensen’s life affirming cleft chin, then sure, check it out. But if you think you’ll be bothered by its general tepidness and focus on comedy at the expense of deep feeling, don’t pay for it. It’s a light watch, good as background noise on a rainy date night, but not worth a trip to the theater.
This is by far the most human response to this movie I’ve read. Most reviews either sing its praises uncritically or focus on the parenting issues. None seem to notice that the film totally ignores the depth and range of emotions a mother’s death normally elicits in children. Of course, there are tears shed when their father matter-of-factly announces mom killed herself. But after that, from crashing the funeral to singing and dancing as her body burns on a homemade pyre, and laughing as they flush the remains down a public toilet, her children seem about as affected by this mother’s death as they would be by a goldfish’s passing. And yet audiences are said to laugh and cry with the characters onscreen. I wanted to cry inspite of them