Okay, you’ve convinced me, Captain Fantastic. The best possible method for raising children combines back-to-the-land survivalism, left-wing political philosophy, a healthy contempt for authority, scientific rigor, artistic refinement, practical strength and the capacity for swift violence. Ben’s kids are, by every measure, exactly the philosopher-kings him and his wife had hoped to raise. If we each had the personal fortitude to offer the same upbringing to our children, who among us would instead choose public schools, microwave meat nuggets, video games and social media? I’d stick my kid in a goddamn Skinner box and leave it there until it’s 18 if I thought it could somehow transmogrify my weak genetic heritage into a nascent ubermensch.
But having spent so much time convincing me, it’s disappointing to watch the rest of Captain Fantastic make a reasonable argument for more familial normalcy. Understandable, yes, but far less enjoyable than the jagged heights of grandeur possible when the human soul is pushed to its very limit.
Opening with eldest son Bodevan (George MacKay) killing a deer and eating its heart, Captain Fantastic gives us the Cheaper By the Dozen you didn’t know you wanted.
Morning begins with “training.” That means running up straight up a mountain, then popping planks and burpees at the top as Daddy dispenses advice on self-reliance.
Then there’s mountain climbing, knife hunting and assorted other educational adventures. Then you get a few scrambling minutes for granola-hippie “farm” chores: plucking eggs, watering plants, cleaning fish, preventing your youngest child from adding to his Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pol Pot-inspired treehouse bone montage. Followed by reading until nightfall, book reports around the campfire (you better be able to explain string theory, tween daughter, and I don’t want to hear any excuses about how its doctoral adherents can barely give a satisfactory explanation themselves), all culminating in the big family hullabaloo, with the only kids in the world who actually want to hear Dad pluck at his gee-tar.
So you’ve got this regimented family, raised by Viggo Mortensen in the woods. It’d make for a hell of a psychological/sociological study, blow the Robbers Cave Experiment right out of the water. But a movie has to happen here too.
Captain Fantastic begins with the suicide of Mom. She was back in civilization, suffering from bipolar disorder and Dad (Frank Langella) doesn’t want Ben bringing his hippie nonsense anywhere near her respectable funeral. So it’s time for the whole clan to hop in a bus and monkeywrench their way across the country.
Here’s where Captain Fantastic is at its best. The kids’ encounters with civilization are tentative, confused, but deeply curious. Bodevan has his first kisses and immediately proposes marriage like a goon. Everyone wants to taste all the exciting things on the IHOP menu. Fuck the police and stick it to the man, etc. etc. At the same time, Ben is deeply conflicted. He’s witnessing the strengths of his brood after finally uncorking their bottle, but he never fit in here, in the real world, and he’s fittingly wary of its many temptations and contemptuous of its taboos and unthinking proprieties.
All of this, even their beloved Noam Chomsky Day celebration, soon serves a fairly traditional dramatic structure, as a family is tested and eventually brought back together, having changed. And while Captain Fantastic is meant to be about how radical, uncompromising structures must bend to fit human frailty and human needs, the movie does too great a job convincing us of its family’s radical power to make the inevitable compromise feel like a satisfying outcome. Maybe it’d be different were it my kid nearly dying for my philosophies, but this viewer can’t help wanting to see Ben’s family get away with it.
