Movie Review—Captain Fantastic

by Peter J. O’Connell

Captain Fantastic. Released: July 2016. Runtime: 118 mins. MPAA Rating: R for language and brief graphic nudity.

A deer is feeding in the forest. Suddenly, a teenage youth, his features smeared with mud, leaps out and slashes the deer’s throat. He then cuts out the animal’s still beating heart and devours a piece of it. His father, also smeared, appears and commends the youth as the boy’s younger siblings—three sisters and two brothers—of ages six to 16, all smeared, look on. Thus we are introduced to the Cash family., the subject of Captain Fantastic, written and directed by Matt Ross.

The family’s name is rather ironic, for Ben, the patriarch of the tribe, is a latter-day eco-hippie/survivalist who, contemptuous of consumer society and concerned about the health of Leslie, his wife and the kids’ mother, took the group “off the grid” ten years before. Since then they have lived in the forests of the Pacific Northwest in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, dwelling in tepees, tents and lean-tos.

The rugged Ben (Viggo Mortensen) is a loving but demanding father. He has many skills, a fact that has led him to be dubbed “Captain Fantastic.” He teaches both survival skills and scholarly ones to his home-schooled kids. However, despite Ben’s emphasis on family unity, tensions are starting to emerge in the group. Bodevan (George MacKay), the deer hunter, wants to experience the wider world, and Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton), injured while climbing a sheer cliff face, is beginning to resent the rigors of the Cash lifestyle outside the money economy. And all the family is concerned about Leslie (Trin Miller), whose physical and emotional problems have led her to be hospitalized in Sacramento, where her sister lives with her husband and kids.

Ben and his brood have to leave their forest home when they learn that Leslie has committed suicide. A t this point the movie shifts from being a sort of study of survivalism to something reminiscent of the “road movies” of the 1960s and 1970s, the era when the ideals that Ben would later follow flourished.

As they proceed to Sacramento in an old school bus, Ben’s kids see much that bewilders or disgusts them. “Why is everyone so fat?” they ask at one point. Some things interest them, though. At one stop Ben uses a faked slip-and-fall as a distraction so that the kids can loot a store. On the way the Cashes also celebrate their version of Christmas—Noam Chomsky Day, in honor of the left-wing linguist.

Arriving in Sacramento, the Cashes stay at Leslie’s sister’s house. The sister (Kathryn Hahn) and her husband (Steve Zahn) are concerned about the way that Ben is raising his and Leslie’s kids, but they can’t help but be impressed by such things as—in contrast to their own kids—the Cash kids’ academic knowledge and their indifference to electronic gizmos.

The movie enters yet another phase, one of family conflict, when Ben and the kids travel from Sacramento to New Mexico. There Jack (Frank Langella), Leslie’s father, a judge, has taken charge of the funeral arrangements for Leslie. He plans a funeral service in a Catholic church, followed by interment of Leslie’s body in a casket in a cemetery. Ben objects, claiming that Leslie was a Buddhist, who wanted to be cremated and have her ashes flushed down a toilet.

Jack’s tightly controlled ferocity in defense of the conventional makes him into, in a sense, a Captain Fantastic, too, as he clashes with Ben, the unyielding defender of the unconventional. The stakes are high and so is suspense as Jack moves to have the kids taken from Ben because of “abuse”—and Bodevan and Rellian grow even more restless. Who will win the struggle for the future of the family? Or can some kind of compromise emerge? What might that be?

Captain Fantastic is, wait for it, a fantastically well done and fantastically enjoyable film—unusual, provocative, satirical yet moving, and fair to all its colorful contending characters. Kudos are owed to writer/director Matt Ross. His cast is remarkable. Veteran thesps Mortensen and Langella just seem to get better and better with each movie that they are in. And the young actors who play the kids are clearly on the road to stardom; they are that good.