If you haven’t seen the movie before, be forewarned. I am about to give away pivotal moments, including the climax and final scenes. So if you’re the person who likes to watch a movie unspoiled now would be a perfect time to go watch it. Go ahead. I’ll wait. This podcast will still be here when you get back.
Opening Scene
As the movie begins, the camera sweeps over the slopes of a mountain wilderness in the Pacific Northwest. Wind whispers in the pines. Birds sing. A brook percolates through the understory. Dappled sunlight lances through the canopy, and a deer steps quietly through the pine needles nibbling on leaves.
But that deer isn’t alone. A pair of eyes look out from the ferns, and when the deer looks up, they close.
Suddenly, there is an explosion of violence. A young man, smeared with camouflage, leaps onto the deer’s back. There is a desperate, confused struggle. A knife to the throat. A splash of blood. The deer falls to the ground.
As it heaves its last breaths, figures emerge from the trees. Children. Five of them … of various ages, some piggy-back on the others … Their hair, skin, and clothes are all caked with camouflaging mud.
Behind them, a shaggy mountain man fords the stream, opens a knife, cuts the deer’s heart from its body, and offers it to the boy hunter. And while the other children look on solemnly, he traces a line in blood down the boy’s forehead. “Today,” he says, “the boy is dead, and in his place … is a man.”
This is the opening scene of the 2016 Bleecker Street film, Captain Fantastic.
Sheila O’Malley’s Review
This is a story about how Captain Fantastic is one of my most favoritest movies in the whole world of all time … But it is also the story of someone who hated it ….a film critic named Sheila O’Malley who gave Captain Fantastic one and a half stars and wrote a review that I found on rogerebert.com that absolutely eviscerated it.
It can be hard to hear someone hate on what you love, and as someone who loved, loved, loved that movie … whew … let me tell ya … her review was hard to read and I expect it will be a little hard to talk about. But that review deeply changed how I think about this story. And so, if I’m gonna talk about Captain Fantastic … there’s no way around it … I have to talk about that review. Not to rebut it, and not because I disagree with it. This isn’t the story of me defending something I love against its detractors … On the contrary … it’s the story of how I had to agree with Sheila O’Malley. On almost all counts. How her review, in a way, broke the movie I loved. And why I still … even after it all … Absolutely. Love. It.
Plot Synopsis
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What’s this movie even about? Let’s start there.
When I talk about this movie with people who haven’t seen it, they usually ask, “Is that a Marvel movie?” And although you’d be forgiven for thinking it based on the title, Captain Fantastic is not a comic book superhero. He’s a home-schooling father of six named Ben Cash, and played by Viggo Mortenson. He is the bearded mountain man who cut the deer’s heart.
He and his wife, Leslie moved to the wilderness about a decade ago in order to be uncompromisingly present in the lives and education of their children.
And there they have remained for years, putting their children through a demanding education in everything from rock-climbing to classical music and from quantum physics to hand-to-hand combat. The kids speak half a dozen languages, read college level texts, run like elite marathoners, and quote the Constitution verbatim.
But when the story begins, Leslie hasn’t been in the wilderness with them for some time because she’s an inpatient at a far-away hospital, being treated for bipolar disorder. Since the family doesn’t have a phone Ben occasionally leaves their wilderness outpost to check on her from a phone at a nearby trading post. And when he does, he learns that she has died by suicide.
That’s the incident that ignites this story.
Leslie’s father, Jack, who blames Ben for Leslie’s suffering, has arranged a church funeral and threatens to have Ben arrested if he so much as shows up. But a Christian burial is something that Ben cannot stand. Leslie was a Buddhist! She’s specifically requested to not be buried in a box. And so, despite the threats, Ben sets out to intervene and ensure that Leslie’s wishes are honored.
And when the children insist on joining him … Ben can’t deny them. And so, this strange family, that has spent its whole existence isolated in the wilderness, embarks on what will become their first real encounter with the wider world.
That journey across the American West, on a retrofitted school bus named Steve, is how the movie unfolds … a culture clash between Ben, his kids, and contemporary America.
Thesis
You might think … quirky characters, off-beat family, unusual setting … that sounds like just the indie movie that critics would love … so what’s that reviewer’s problem with it?
Well, if I understand her, Sheila O’Malley’s critique boils down to two main points:
- The main character, Ben, is a jerk … and instead of calling him out for being a jerk, this movie turns him into a hero. AND
- In the process, the film glorifies Ben’s way of life … a utopian vision based on a naive and misguided idea that getting back to nature will eradicate the problems of the world.
And. after reading her review, I had to agree. Ben really is a sanctimonious jerk. This movie really does paint a gleefully sympathetic picture of him. It is jarringly and intentionally offensive. And living or parenting the way that Ben does won’t solve anything.
But even after painfully letting all of that settle in my heart, I still think this movie is worth loving … both for what it says and for how it says it.
“Do I contradict myself? Ha! I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.”
Part 1: Ben is a jerk.
Why I Love Ben and His Dream In the First Place
Before we dig into Sheila O’Malley’s review, let me tell you a bit about why this particular movie resonated with me so perfectly.
I grew up in a Connecticut suburb in the 1980s … in a time and place where the shopping mall was the nexus of the social world and where convention was the rule … and … bookish, awkward kid that I was … I just couldn’t convene, couldn’t fit in … and I was very, very lonely. And the future seemed to hold no respite. The adults in my town all seemed trapped in stressful jobs where bosses told them what to do all day until they went home and dulled their weariness by the TV. Human society seemed a dismal and hopeless place. And I yearned to escape it.
For me, the symbol of that escape was the woods behind my house.
I would lie in bed every night and … no joke … fantasize about being kidnapped by some benevolent tribe of woodspeople. They would put me in a sac so I would have no way to find my way back, take me to their village, and initiate me into the secret ways of the forest. The training would be grueling. I would be pushed way beyond my limits … kind of a nature lover’s Navy SEAL training. But I would persevere. And be transformed into a kind of spirit of the forest, able to fend for myself anywhere, free to live a life of adventure.
Later, as a young man, I tried to make that imagined training a reality. I taught myself wilderness survival. I learned to track, to forage for wild plants, to navigate the wilderness without map or compass, to build lean-tos, and to start fires without matches. I genuinely believed my skills would set me free. But what I was missing was a teacher, a wiser, older woodsperson to help me, to push me to reach my full potential.
And those opening scenes of Captain Fantastic brought my exact childhood dream to life. I had goosebumps. I almost don’t want to keep watching for fear that something would fall short and taint that perfect vision. Ben’s dream was my dream.
His little wilderness commune was my woodpeople village. His kids were getting the training that I wanted. And look what they could do! Everything! They grew and stored and processed their own food, field dressed the deer. It was all Bear Grylls survivorman, but it was also unapologetically nerdy. Around the fire at night, they read books like The Brothers Karamazov and The Fabric of the Cosmos.
I wanted that! I still want that! Not just the freedom of the mountains and the confidence and the self-possession. I wanted a teacher like Ben … a believable version of Yoda or Mr. Miagi … someone to lovingly but insistently push me to be my wisest, strongest, ablest self. If the movie had stopped right there, I would have signed up to join Ben’s tribe in a heartbeat … and Ben Cash would still have been one of my favorite characters of all time.
But Sheila O’Malley? She saw this teacher very differently. Remember … sanctimonious jerk!
And Then I Read SOM’s Review
When I first read her review I was grumpy and defensive. I told myself, and my patiently listening wife, about all the reasons she was wrong … about how she’d been biased by her own ideas and how, because of that, she had totally missed the point. And I kept thinking this for some months until I watched the movie again.
By this time, the proverbial genie had left the bottle, and there was no putting it back in. I saw her critique in every scene, and even I couldn’t deny …she was absolutely right … We could go to so many scenes to show you what I’m talking about, but let me take to you one that is particularly poignant. I’ll show you what I mean.
Harper’s House: A Case Study
On their way to the funeral, Ben and the kids stay overnight with Ben’s sister, Harper, her husband, and their two teenage boys in a suburban cul-de-sac neighborhood. Having just come from Ben’s wilderness outpost, common scenes of suburban life take on new meaning–the way Harper’s kids can’t pull themselves away from their phones, the bald rudeness with which they talk to their parents, the meaningless euphemisms the adults use to talk about death. On one hand we see the horrified looks on the Cash kid’s faces as they watch Harper’s boys play Killer Instinct on XBox, and in return the horrified look on Harper’s face when Ben’s family opts to sleep under the stars in their backyard instead of her house.
When I first watched this scene, I can remember cheering Ben on. The things that this scene called out were the very things that drove me up the wall about my own hometown … the shallow small talk … the entitlement … the constant wondering of “what will the neighbors think?”
But watching this after reading Sheila O’Malley’s review was a very different experience.
Ben’s a Jerk
This time, I couldn’t help seeing this guy who comes to someone else’s house… where he’s been invited as a guest and then explicitly, repeatedly, unabashedly, judges how they live? He lectures them about how silly they are to keep wine from their kids. “Kids in France drink wine all the time.” Instead of graciously accepting their condolences about Leslie, he calls them out about the time they got into an argument with her. (“We all know you didn’t like her,” he says.) He purposefully humiliates their kids by outing them for how ignorant of the most basic foundations of the American Constitution while his eight-year-old delivers a soliloquy on the First Amendment. Ben is a terrible guest.
And the Movie Gives Him a Pass
And even watching it attuned to all the ways that Ben is being insulting, dogmatic, judgemental. I’m still rooting for him. I’m thinking through the whole thing, “Yes, those platitudes are hollow. It is ridiculous that American kids can’t have a sip of wine. It is embarrassing and dangerous that so many Americans know so little about our country’s political architecture. How do I end up siding with Ben, even when he’s being such a jerk? Is there something wrong with me?
Maybe? But I don’t think so, I think I side with Ben because the camera’s eye sides with Ben. The movie itself sides with Ben. And that was Sheila O’Malley’s other critique that I was forced to admit, as much as I hated to. The movie was giving Ben a pass for his bad behavior and it was giving me every reason to do the same.
Why This Movie Is Still Worth Loving
On this post-review watching, I couldn’t help but see all the flaws of this character that I loved so much … and how I had written him a blank check. I don’t know if you’ve ever had someone point out all the flaws in a work of art that you’ve loved. All I can tell you is that no matter how hard you wish to, you can’t unsee them. And you lose something that feels pure and beautiful. At least, I did.
But here’s the thing, I kept watching the movie. It was a different movie than the one I had fallen in love with. But it was still compelling. And something kind of amazing happened as I watched it. I fell in love with it again, but in a really different way. And in the end, even though I felt hoodwinked into treating Ben so uncritically, I started to see this as actually part of the movie’s genius …That maybe that very ruse was the secret ingredient that made this movie so good.
Let me tell you how.
Escalating Conflict
By the middle of the movie, the conflict between Ben and the society that he disdains, erupts on a whole new front. Where before the conflict was coming from outside, now it was coming from within his own family.
Bo
This new conflict arises gradually, but it hits most poignantly with a confrontation between Ben and his oldest son, Bo, who must be about eighteen.
The family stops their old bus for a night in a campground, where Bo, played by George MacKay, meets a flirtatious girl about his age. The earnestness of Bo’s attraction is so sweet … and so awkward. Bo takes misstep after cringe-worthy misstep. [Examples?] He is clueless … and as this encounter progresses, you can see in Bo’s face this realization of just how inept he is. In the end, he makes a humiliating proposal of marriage to the girl and her mother who both take his declarations of love for a joke and leave him under the streetlights out of their RV.
Later, Bo confronts Ben head-on.
He drops a stack of acceptance letters from a suite of Ivy League schools on the campsite picnic table in front of his father. Letters that he’s been hiding. I can’t think of any parent who wouldn’t be ebullient. But Ben sits back and nods his head. “I don’t know what more impressive,” Ben says, “the fact that you got into all these fine schools or that for months you’ve been lying directly to my face.”
“It was Mom,” Bo reveals, “Mom helped me with all of it. We did it together. I just want to go to college.” And when Ben protests, listing all the things that Bo knows, all the academic accomplishments, all the languages. Bo shouts back “I know nothing. I know nothing. I am a freak because of you.”
MacKay’s acting here is impeccable. And my heart breaks for this kid. Bo is facing the cusp of adulthood alone … a Frankenstein’s monster with no common ground from which to relate to other people.
“I am a freak because of you!” It is one of the films most affecting moments.
And in it … I’m not sure who I’m rooting for anymore. Could it be that this beautiful dream Ben’s made is hurting the very people it was built for?
And my discomfort only grows as the plot accelerates. Hang with me here for a moment. Because I’d like to explore another scene where I think that discomfort comes to a head.
Crossbow Scene
After the family shows up at the funeral, and Ben confronts Jack. [ and …. ] One of Ben’s other sons, Rellian, leaves Ben to go live with Jack Of all of Ben’s kids, Rellian has been the most confrontational, the most critical of their eccentric lifestyle. Rellian wants to fit in. He wants to be normal. And, like Jack, he blames Ben for Leslie’s illness. “Dad made her crazy.” he tells Bo. And in the confusion of the funeral, Rellian slips away with his grandfather. And when Ben arrives at his father-in-law’s palatial home to retrieve his son, Jack refuses to let Rellian go. Ben, unwilling to listen, walks out the door. And Jack fires a crossbow bolt into the wall just a few inches from Ben’s head.
This is what it takes to get Ben’s attention.
And listen he must. Frank calmly unleashes a battery of pointed questions that lay bare the hypocrisy that Ben … and me as the viewer … have failed to acknowledge. “You didn’t treat Rellian’s broken wrist because you were trying to teach him to take care of himself? Really? You taught your kids to shoplift?” “It was part of their training.” “Oh, so you were training your kids to shoplift.”
In her review Sheila O’Malley complains that Frank is made out to be the villain at every turn. And up until this scene, that is how I have seen him … the embodiment of all the excesses that Ben has been railing against. But in this scene, partly because of her review and partly because of my own growing discomfort, I see Frank in a new way. He is not the villain. He is angry and he is sad … because he’s just lost his daughter. He doesn’t hate Ben. But he’s afraid for the safety of his grandchildren. And there is no getting around it, just like Sheila O’Malley, Frank is right.
I realize, I didn’t need Sheila O’Malley to point out Ben’s flaws. The movie does it for me. Yes, the movie brought us close to him, made us sympathize with him, treated him like a hero … glossed over his arrogance.
And that’s exactly perfect. Because now, this scene illuminates all the slack that I have given Ben. Suddenly my perspective shifts. I feel sheepish… uncomfortably complicit in Ben’s blindness. And that is what lends this scene its emotional power. As Ben’s folly is laid bare, so is mine. I don’t just question Ben. I question myself. And isn’t that one of the things great stories are for?
Part 2: Ben’s Vision is Flawed.
Sheila O’Malley’s Review
But remember … this was not the whole of Sheila O’Malley’s review. She wasn’t just critical of how starry-eyed the film seems to be about its main character and how it cuts him too much slack when he gets carried away in his own dogmatism. She was skeptical of the very idea of his radical parenting venture.
In the conclusion to her review, she asks, “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?”
She contends that Captain Fantastic is “a drama about a family going back to nature,” … that it (wrongly, in her view) points a finger of condemnation at society … that it espouses the view that “If human beings could “get back to nature,” then maybe all the problems in the world could be eradicated.” I’m not actually sure that Ben Cash would agree with that statement, but that’s beside the point. Whatever Ben’s personal philosophy might have been, Sheila O’Malley thought the movie painted a glowing picture of Ben’s whole left-wing, utopian experiment.
And, again, I can’t argue. Even if it eventually does make me uncomfortable with the fanaticism with which Ben holds to his ideals, it never makes a case against the ideals themselves. It calls out the failures of modern America wherever it can. Next to Ben’s precocious, well-read, athletic, thoughtful, and self-reliant children, the America it portrays is overweight, chained to convention, hypnotized by consumerism, poorly educated, and complacently languishing in the lowest common denominator of moral standards. As much as we might question Ben’s choices, the film gives us no reason to redeem or forgive America or to question the righteousness of the alternate path that Ben is trying to forge. Captain Fantastic never wakes up to realize that “a hot bath and a warm bed are nothing to sneeze at.”
In my post-review viewing of Captain Fantastic, I found myself agreeing with Sheila O’Malley’s claims about all of this. I could not deny that Ben’s mountain school for philosopher-kings was fundamentally misguided.
But here, at last, is where Sheila O’Malley and I part ways. Ben’s mission may be misguided, we just think it’s misguided for very different reasons.
Still Worth Loving
I think that for Sheila O’Malley, Captain Fantastic was basically a political movie.
But is this really a story about capitalism or the American way of life?
Indeed, how do you ever say what a story is really ‘about?’ There are probably as many ways to do this as there are readers or viewers. But I would offer that if a story says anything, the climax is where it says it most clearly … the final, irrevocable choice of its protagonist. And in this story that climactic choice isn’t about whether to live in society or get back to nature … It’s about how a father does right by his family.
After the crossbow scene, I might see Ben’s shortcoming. But here’s the thing … Ben does not.
And now I watch him hurtling to his own undoing. In the end, Ben decides to “rescue” Rellian. [fact check] Never mind that Rellian left of his own free will. He comes up with a mission, as if his kids were a special forces team. He plans his attack and sends (name) his daughter into Jack’s house to fetch Rellian. The plan is for her to climb onto Jack’s roof and swing down through Rellian’s second story window. And she is halfway there when a terra-cotta shingle breaks. She falls. Her body lies motionless on the pavement below.
I have no doubt that Ben and Leslie started their quest with the best intentions. They wanted the best they could give their kids. They were willing to devote their lives to them. But in the end, Ben’s gift was more about him than it was about them. And as (vespr?) gets wheeled, in traction, on a hospital gurney into the emergency room, even Ben can’t fail to see that.
Can you imagine being in those shoes? Holding your daughter’s hand, wondering if you’ve paralyzed her, killed her.
This is when Ben realizes, the problem isn’t Jack or Rellian or corporate power. It was him.
Ben’s real choice … and what I think this movie is ultimately about … is whether to continue to try to control his kids’ destinies or to let them go.
His daughter, it turns out is very, very lucky. She is not dead. She is not paralyzed. But, the doctors say, just a few more inches … [fact check]
That’s when Ben gives up. Literally. He gives up his own children. To pass their care over to Jack. For their own safety. To protect them from himself. I can’t think of any sacrifice harder to make.
Our Kids Are Not Our Own
So there I am, sitting in the audience, feeling the impossibility of that choice. I mourn the death of a beautiful dream of raising philosopher-kings even as I cannot deny the rightness of abandoning it.
What does Captain Fantastic say to us? This is the message that I take away: Our kids are not our own. They do not belong to us like a shirt or a TV or a car. They are not future people to be molded. They are people already–who already have dreams and desires and values. Their hearts are not (and ought not be) ours to shape.
But Captain Fantastic also has deep compassion for why we try. We want to mold our kids because we love them. We love them so much it hurts. We want their lives to be rich and fulfilling. We want to skew the balance of their lives away from pain and toward joy. And we want them to be the kind of people that we aspire to be. Captain Fantastic reminds me both that this is natural and that it is folly. All our molding of young minds … it’s is always more about us than it is about them.
This movie asks me, “Who are you to preach to your kids about the right way to live? Have you got this life figured out?” And, every time, my answer is that I’m bumbling around in the dark, just doing the best I can.
What I realized after coming back to this movie after reading Sheila O’Malley’s review, was that in the end … in those final scenes … I wasn’t musing about politics or going back to a state of nature. I’m asking myself, “If I truly lived by my deepest ideals, would I be justified to impose those ideals on my children?” Ironically, this movie forced me to confront the very questions that Sheila O’Malley thought it dodged.
At the end of the film, Ben isn’t sure any more. He leaves his kids with Jack and drives away. He shaves his beard. He turns his bus toward the desert, looking for repentance. He doesn’t say anything, but I can still hear him calling out for a chance to do it again.
And what about us–the people out here who aren’t raising our kids in a commune or a cult? Do these questions even matter?
Well, I for one, believe they do. Commune or no, utopian projects are all around us. One mother wants her son to be a doctor. She mounts a campaign to secure his spot in the right pre-school as his first step on the way to Hopkins. Another father wants his children to build their lives around Christ. So he pulls them out of school to protect their minds from the pollutions of secularism. Parents of all political stripes fight about what kind of history will be taught in schools, afraid that kids will come see America through the political lens of “the other side.” People talk about “parent’s rights” over their kids’ education. Bureaucrats wring their hands over kids’ progress toward learning standards. Politicians lament that America is losing its edge in the global marketplace and proclaim school policies that will turn our children into a competitive workforce.
When I look around, I see us making Ben’s mistakes over and over again. And every day, we have to make the same choice he did. Do we stay this course? Or is there going to be a time when we realize that if we truly love our kids that we’re going to have to let them forge their own destinies?
Who It Says it To
I don’t know that anything I say here will ever convince Sheila O’Malley to love it. There is no accounting for taste. Love is not swayed by rational argument. But in the end she has helped me to love it more.
But in a time when movie making is more industry than art … when the closest a Hollywood product gets to having something to say is “follow your dream” or “you’ve got to believe in yourself” or “true love conquers all” … and when the entertainment engine is pointed squarely at mass appeal in hopes of turning blockbusters into cash … I’m glad for a movie that dares to say something that might be unpopular. I’m glad for a movie that wasn’t made for everyone.
It was made for me!
Conclusion
So … Where does Captain Fantastic leave us in the end?
Final Scene
In the final scenes, Ben is utterly alone … surrounded by desert … the skyline of a Southwestern city sprawls in the distance. The sun is setting. Ben sits beside a campfire outside of the bus, haunted by the ghosts of all that he has lost. And in the twilight, the kids emerge from the bus where they have stowed away. His actual kids. All of them … even Rellian.
[We need dialogue from that scene here.]
You see, in the end … the kids had choices too. Perhaps, now that Ben has left them, They have a clearer choice than ever before.
And they chose Ben. They are not his followers. They are his children. And they love him.
And the whole family finishes what they had set out to do. They give Leslie a joyful, tearful, unconventional cremation and, in accordance with her wishes, they flush her ashes down a public toilet.
Bo doesn’t go to college. At least not yet. But he does leave… for Africa … out at last to explore the world on his own terms.
Then the camera’s eye fades into mist. We hear laughter. When the picture resolves again, we see the bus rusting and up on blocks, full of chickens. Ben’s daughter run with a basket of eggs to an old farmhouse. And the camera follows them inside. We see a roomful of yarn taped to the walls. (Watch this scene again for details.) We see brown bags lined up on the counter with the kids’ names on them. And just as in one of the very first scenes when Ben announced that training would begin in ten minutes, he calls out. “The school bus will be here in ten minutes.”
The kids tuck in to their breakfasts around a small table, each with their nose in a book. And Ben, pensive, looks out the window in a silent kitchen.
He is humbler, smaller. This house is full of a thousand little compromises.
But the core of Ben’s vision is still there–a house full of kids reading great books, living simply, learning to take care of themselves. Not because that’s the rule. Not because it’s part of their training, but because Ben has persuaded them by the dignity of his example. And they have chosen this new, compromised way together.
Unlike the on-the-nose messaging of earlier scenes, this one doesn’t proselytize. It’s subtle. Just like Ben, the movie has loosened its grip on the story. “Make of this scene what you will,” it says, “This story’s not just in our hands anymore. It’s in yours.”
I love this ending–as powerful for me, in its own way, as the opening.
I don’t know what you’ll take from that scene. But here’s what I take. Even though raising our kids is an impossible responsibility. And even though we are bound to mess it up. In the end, there is atonement.
In this ending, I find a faith that, despite ourselves, we can somehow do right by that sacred trust. Living our ideals is full of pitfalls, but so is every way on this green earth worth traveling. We needn’t give up trying to pass on our highest ideals. And maybe we can, if we do not hold them too tightly … and we keep listening … and we trust our children to chart their own course … even as we, humbly, muddle through our own.