Critics reviews

It's enjoyable the way Matthew Ross's screenplay and direction try to denaturalize ordinary American life as it's lived in the suburbs, but nothing everyone hasn't thought a million times before. To provide mainstream balance, Ross tempers Mortensen's nobility by presenting him as a danger to his family, a radical who hasn't really thought things through.

As the plot shreds credibility by steering towards a weird DIY funeral that would land anyone in prison, not to mention scar the children for life, we tend to forget how, in real-life America, this kind of whole-hog rejectionist lifestyle tends to come with a lot of guns... The experience is akin to a long weekend spent with those know-it-all home-schooling parents who can't stop talking about how they grow their own kale and breastfeed their tots until they're ten.

There's something perversely ingenious about Captain Fantastic... It is an independent film that seems to be as meticulously calculated to meet the expectations of its audience as any studio-made intergalactic adventure. Though it's not an especially good movie, it's a very skillfully constructed one, and it runs on a fantasy that's as persuasive and as credible to its target audience as comic-book adventures are to a different viewership.

Most damning of all is the shallowness of the film's social critique. Ross gestures at a philosophical foundation to the family's primitivism via references to Plato, Chomsky, and the Bill of Rights, despite the fact that none of these thinkers or writings advocate anything close to the back-to-the-land lifestyle that Ben and his children adopt... The film's nebulous ideology can be boiled down to the family's repeated call and response: "Power to the people. Stick it to the Man.

With nods to Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Émile, Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic gained points for originality: Viggo Mortensen raises six children in near-total self-sufficiency in the backwoods of the Pacific North-West, providing them with a superlative education to boot, but the film's saccharine, Little Miss Sunshine-esque ending betrays its origins as a Sundance hit.

If Ben were a "Jesus Camp" type, steeped in a political brand of Christianity, preparing his kids for apocalyptic Rapture, would his behavior be presented as adorably eccentric as it is here? Would a film present a survivalist-dad holed up with his kids and his weaponry as uncritically? It's the same mindset, just different ideologies. Just because Ben is a lefty doesn't mean he's not a jerk. "Captain Fantastic" could have used a lot more skepticism.

Perhaps it's no surprise that Ross ends up nudging the movie into more generic terrain. He never sells out his characters, but after all the radical power-to-the people talk he finally comes down on the side of compromise and the soft landing. It's left to Mortensen, who can make menace feel like vulnerability, to keep the movie from slipping into sentimentality. He's the most obvious reason to see it, although Ross's insistence on taking your intelligence for granted is itself a great turn on.

A film that boldly answers the question "What if The Hills Have Eyes was Little Miss Sunshine?", Captain Fantastic wants nothing more than to tie you to a chair made of human skin and lecture you about your disgusting reliance on public schools and cell phones.

Ross lapses into contrivance, narrative and emotional, but it'd be worse without Mortensen's utter conviction and that rugged, out-of-time mien which has served him well in stories of extremity from The Road to Jauja. A very surprised Ross won a major prize at Cannes for his efforts, months after the film's Sundance debut, but for my money, nothing improves upon the opening drone-like shot of sunny mountain woods, the perspective faintly curved, a perverse snow-globe snapshot of isolation.