REAL-WORLD EDUCATION OF A BACK-TO-THE-EARTH CLAN
Captain Fantastic is not a lost Marvel or DC superhero, although his insistence on truth, weapons training and self-sufficiency would seem to place him somewhere in that continuum. Not to mention his name, which just screams alter ego: Ben Cash.
But Ben is merely a father trying to do what’s best for his six children. And he’s not cutting any corners.
The family lives in a forested region of the northwestern United States, and home-schooling includes Marines-style physical exercise, animal butchery, multiple languages and a generous dose of Noam Chomsky.
We learn all this in the film’s opening minutes, along with the whereabouts of Leslie, the kids’ mom. She’s in hospital, suffering from a brain-chemistry malady that even back-to-the-earth Ben admits can’t be treated with herbal remedies. Unfortunately, modern medicine proves no better. Ben learns during his weekly check-in with civilization that his wife has killed herself.
What follows is part road trip, part heist movie and part meditation on extreme parenting. Ben packs the kids into the family bus — for some reason named Steve — and heads off to Leslie’s funeral. This in spite of the fact that her no-nonsense father (Frank Langella) has announced he’ll have the latter-day Buddhist arrested if he tries to interfere with her Christian burial.
Captain Fantastic, from actorturned-writer/director Matt Ross, is clearly a Viggo Mortensen vehicle, but that’s not to say the children function as mere props. They range in age from eight to 18 and get more interesting as they approach adulthood.
This makes George MacKay’s Bodevan the most fascinating soul in the movie. Most films take a socially stunted character, make him a genius and leave it at that. But Bodevan also demonstrates a quick wit and the occasional flash of humour, even if it can be hard to tell when he’s on the level. (His impromptu marriage proposal to a girl he just kissed in a trailer park is a selfcontained comic gem of a scene.)
Close second is Mortensen himself. Ben is trying to live his life by absolute principles, and slowly (so slowly!) realizing that it’s a technique that works perfectly only in theory, or perhaps in isolation. Enter the gates of society and you find honesty isn’t always the best policy, and intolerance is frowned upon. So is theft, even if you are sticking it to the man.
What makes Captain Fantastic such a trip is that the film refuses to condemn Ben for his choices. It leaves the audience to decide whether and when he’s gone too far, when he’s sticking to his beliefs (I tell my kids the truth!) versus when he’s using them to show off — look what they know about the Constitution!
The scene in which the Cashes visit Ben’s sister and husband (Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn, a perfectly cast rhyming couplet) starts off tense and threatens to go nova, but everyone watching it will have a different opinion on when the chain reaction goes critical.
But part of the fun in this movie is waiting with bated breath for things to go wrong. The rest is watching Mortensen’s character, whom you know wasn’t raised off-grid, trying to navigate his self-inflicted moral code. “We don’t make fun of people,” he instructs the kids at one point. “Except Christians.”
You’d think his small army of Trotskyite-Maoist-Buddhistnudist-autodidacts, schooled in the Bible and the Qur’an and good with knives, would be able to handle just about anything. And they do make short work of a state trooper who boards their bus on the pretext of a broken tail light, then scurries off moments later, eager to be rid of them. But the most mundane obstacles trip them. No upbringing can prepare a child for everything. And no parent will ever stop trying.