Sean Penn's Into the Wild is an amazing, beautiful film.

Adapted from Jon Krakauer's book and based on a true story, it follows the post-college wanderlust of Chris McCandless (played incredibly by Emile Hirsch) as he abandons the safety and security of his well-to-do but dysfunctional family, sends his life savings to charity, burns his Social Security card, and disappears into the tides of life on the outskirts of "society." Adopting the new identity Alexander Supertramp, McCandless becomes one of those two-legged memorials to the law of happenstance, riding the rails, camping in the desert, working a wheat combine, kayaking into Mexico, and eventually making his way back up into his last frontier -- the social void of the unspoiled Alaskan wilderness.

Along the way McCandless meets a variety of fellow tramps and Good Samaritan types, most notably war veteran widower Hal Holbrook whose final scene with Hirsch is heartbreaking.

The movie really resonated with me, perhaps for the same reasons Paul Auster's "homeless men" stories resonate with me: they ponder what happens when man is stripped down to the solitude of the merest existence. Does stripping yourself of the constraints of society and attainments cause one to cease to exist? Or does shrinking this way to the smallest point humanly possible -- for Alexander Supertramp, living dangerously in the harsh wild without any creature comforts -- actually make existence more full, more true?

The irony in Into the Wild (I think) is that both possibilities are realized. McCandless comes to a startling realization at the apex of his physical despair, but the message of the film may be that his willingness to embrace hardship, his willingness to fling himself into the violent whimsy of a great big earth was the only way to reach that realization.

In any event, the movie is fantastic. Beautifully acted and beautifully photographed. The supporting cast (Holbrook, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, Jena Malone) is excellent, none more so than the unknown supporting actor (IMDB does not identify him clearly) who played the old man trying to reconcile with an angry wife (girlfriend?) on a payphone. That 45 second scene alone packed more emotional power than any other movie I've seen in the last year.

I haven't seen the films nominated for Best Picture at the last Oscars (No Country for Old Men arrives today from NetFlix), but I think I will have a hard time understanding how Into the Wild got overlooked.

(FYI: The movie is 2.5 hours long and does contain some content that would be objectionable to some of our readers.)