Into the Wild by Sean Penn

Year 2007, Issue: 25, 99 - 101, 01.04.2007

Mark Bousquet

Abstract

Hollywood has had a long love affair with the American landscape. Typically focused on the open expanses of the American West evidenced most prominently in the westerns of John Ford, Clint Eastwood, and Kevin Costner , directors have seemingly operated on the principle that intrinsic to any story set against nature is to highlight the bigness and beauty of the land. Sean Penn’s approach seen through the cinematography of Eric Gautier to shooting the landscape in Into the Wild operates largely antithetically to the western. Instead of focusing on the largeness of the American wilderness, Penn’s approach owes a stylistic debt to Terence Malick whom Penn worked with on The Thin Red Line 1998 , crafting an intimate relationship with the natural world.