A family drama about non-traditional education and the vicissitudes of living in an anarchist hippy commune.
The second film by American actor Matt Ross, who won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for Best Director.
Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) is the father of six children. His family lives in the forest, using survivalist skills and hunting for food with knives. The children’s education also includes the sciences, particularly Marxist classics, quantum theory, and modernist literature. They listen to Bach rather than rap, eat home-grown vegetables rather than burgers, and celebrate Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas. But isolation and progressive education, regardless of how much knowledge the kids get from books, does not help them interact with others. Their mother’s unexpected suicide forces the family to leave the forest and come into contact with civilization and their own contradictions.
This striking black comedy (the world premiere took place at Sundance, the holy of holies of American independent cinema) has some autobiographical elements. Matt Ross and his wife encountered the question of alternative pedagogy and the acceptable limits of parental involvement in the educational process when they became parents, and Captain Fantastic is one of the most radical cinematic fantasies on this theme. The director invested his personal experience of growing up in a hippy commune in the film, something which clearly had its own contradictions. Captain Fantastic is both a satire about the utopian thinking of left-wing people and an anti-capitalist pamphlet addressed to the world of consumerism. Even so, the viewer can see which side the director is on. Some of the difficult moments are smoothed over by Mortensen’s charisma. He is ideally suited to the role of the Rousseauist father, but from a different perspective he can also be seen as the leader of a nuclear sect and the dark ghost of Charles Manson. The main question remaining after viewing is where the boundary lies between socialism within an individual family and a «velvet dictatorship» established with good intentions.
Captain Fantastic
Director Matt Ross
USA, 2016. 118 min. 18+