Captain Fantastic

Grade: A-

I always enjoy when I have the Academy Award Best Picture nominees under my belt, and I’m then just making my way through the movies that have individual acting nominations, but no Picture or Director nod. Films like Captain Fantastic are the reason I have fun with this. I liked this one more than several of the movies which are supposed to be our potential Best Picture this year, and is one that I hope everybody sees. It came out last summer, but I am only just now seeing it because Viggo Mortensen has a well-deserved Best Actor nomination. He plays the supposedly single father (the mother is out of the picture for reasons I’ll leave you to discover) who raises his 6 children in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. He keeps them under rigorous physical and intellectual training. They are extremely resourceful, and can put domestic kids to shame with their rote bookwormy knowledge of just about anything. Not too shabby for a bunch of kids who never went to school. The critic for Roger Ebert’s website, who was not a fan of the movie, criticized it for being too much like a “Family as Cult” where any individual thinking is shot down. She must have forgotten about the scene where one of the sons challenges a tradition the father likes to have, and Mortensen diplomatically says “Let’s have a discourse. If your arguments are valid, who knows? Maybe you’ll change and open my mind.” I’m paraphrasing here, but not that much. This is pretty much what the typical dialogue sounds like. The material here is perfect for an adaptation into a Broadway musical, and I’d love to see it transplanted to the stage. When the children speak, it’s always one at a time, in almost a verse-like language, to the point where they sound like six parts of the same voice.

I have just scratched the surface of the plot. Captain Fantastic (unfortunately, there’s no Brown Dirt Cowboy here) is a VERY dark, quirky, fun dramedy that will make you think and give you tremendous amounts of hope. What a magical movie this is.
Grade: A-