Captain Fantastic
Director: Matt Ross
Talent: Viggo Mortensen, George MacKay, Samantha Isler, Annalise Basso
Release Date: 9th September
Ben (Mortensen) is a hard-line, liberal dad, who has raised his six children in Walden-esque, rural isolation for years, teaching them survival skills and educating them in maths, literature and history by himself, while his wife (their mother) — supportive of his methods, ostensibly — is sick in hospital. When tragedy strikes, Ben and the kids must face The Real World, and the potential custodial battle with their upper-class grandparents that goes with it.
On the face of things, Captain Fantastic has the potential to ask interesting questions about, broadly, how to live well in an irreparably compromised society, through the parental narrative at its centre. Instead it gets by on cheap characterisations of what reactionaries think left-wing people are like (e.g. instead of Christmas, Ben and his kids celebrate ‘Noam Chomsky Day’), bringing a sitcom’s frame of reference to what professes to be a serious drama. What is eventually reaffirmed by its narrative, in a similarly offhand manner, is not the liberal worldview, but rather just the symbolic authority of the father, dispossessed of an ethical dimension. A troubling development indeed.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
