Captain Fantastic

Captain Fantastic is about a man living the American Libertarian dream: him, his wife and their six children all live in an idyllic forest, meditating and rock-climbing by day, reading Middlemarch and quantum mechanics at night (in lieu of going to an actual school). They grow and hunt their own food; they use a waterfall for a shower. They are entirely self-sufficient and completely unconnected to government resources. Everything seems just about perfect (aside from injuries obtained from remarkably dangerous activities such as rock-climbing), until, one day, his wife kills herself. From there, the utopia starts to unravel.

This is a film with charm, wit and a genuine individuality that doesn’t degrade to mere quirkiness

The brilliance of this film is in the balance it brings to proceedings. Viggo Mortensen’s Ben Cash, the titular Captain Fantastic, may be undeniably brilliant (he’s a profoundly well-read intellectual who’s home-schooled his children to genius level), but his smug sense of superiority over the rest of consumerist America is gradually shown to be flawed. He is both the protagonist we root for and an antagonist against his children, who rail against him claiming that he’s made them “weird”, unable to connect with people their age, and ignorant about the real world outside their forest.

Image Source: eOne Films International

One of the most profound dialogues of the film comes from one of his children who yells, “if it hasn’t come from a book, I don’t know anything!” Our ostensible protagonist is shown to be an antagonist to his far more likeable and sympathetic children: he hijacks his wife’s funeral to complain about how it isn’t in fitting with her Buddhist, anti-organised religion values (although, like everything in this film, there’s an ambivalence here: he may be disturbing his wife’s family and friends, but he is right about who his wife was). His wife’s father, perhaps mainly motivated by fury over his daughter’s death, files for custody over the children, and we as viewers are left for ourselves to decide who the children would truly be better off with.

This is a film with charm, wit and a genuine individuality that doesn’t degrade to mere quirkiness: it may be flawed in the sentimentality of proceedings at the end of the film, where a previously morally complex and interesting plot is neatly wrapped with a bow, but it achieves enough in making us truly think and care for characters who manage to be deeply believable in a surreal situation. In this, it’s one of the most heartfelt yet intelligent films to come out this year.