Captain Fantastic – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a man who catches himself in the trap he tries to escape from.

On vacation, the youngest and currently most reluctant stepdaughter told us about a film released a couple of years ago that had entered none of our radar screens.  She stated that it was her favorite – Captain Fantastic – which, she assured us, was not a superhero movie – it is, rather, an arthouse release about a father (Ben Cash played by Viggo Mortensen) who is raising his six children in the backwoods of the American Northwest and they are working to grieve the loss of their mother (Leslie Cash played by Trin Miller).  It turned out that their mother has died of suicide – she had bipolar disorder and had left the family to seek psychiatric treatment in a hospital out in the real world four or five months before the  the action starts on the day after her death when the father finds out, via phone call, that cutting her wrists has led to her death. 

I am going to start describing this flawed film by telling the backstory – this will be an imaginary voyage on my part – put together by the clues in the plot and the descriptions of the characters.  The attempt is to anticipate the flaws – flaws that exist in our culture – flaws the protagonists were attempting to address in their alternative lifestyles – but flaws that, I think, they carried into that lifestyle – and that then get reflected in a story about their efforts to create an Eden – and the efforts to even imagine this Eden - the movie – which I think of as a dream of the writer/director – and apparently the actor – Viggo Mortensen who shares some of the Director’s (Matt Ross) ideals.

In my mind, the protagonists met in college.  He was from a Midwestern town.  He had always been the smartest in his class, and his father had always been smart, too, perhaps he was mechanically gifted and worked as an engineer and, while they had a nice life, perhaps both father and son always felt that it didn’t match their expectations of the kind of life they could or should have.  They – but certainly the son – felt entitled to more.  She was from a wealthy family – a family that had made its money in oil or mining but despite the tumult that had gone into creating the wealth, she was raised in a cloistered and strict environment, but she was rebellious, headstrong and very smart.  Her father was deeply in love with her, but also did not understand why she was not more like her sister, who was a much more conventional and docile person.

They met at a prestigious school where they had the best teachers, and he excelled there – drinking in what the professors and the other students had to offer, but he was idealistic and a little hard to get along with – he would correct his teachers and he was like Will In Good Will Hunting – a force of nature who did not suffer foolish teachers or students easily.  She was drawn to his idealism – it reminded her of her Dad, but he seemed to be so focused on the things that mattered – spiritual, philosophical and moral things – not material things.  They studied Buddhism together and became converts, learning about and practicing the religion both as an expression of their shared beliefs and also as a way to begin to carve out a life for themselves.

They married, much against her father’s wishes, likely in a big church wedding with lots of her family and friends there, but without so many from his family, which is smaller and not as well connected – and he felt uncomfortable inviting many of his friends.  Or perhaps they eloped, infuriating her father.  They decided to have a large family and raise them to embrace the world in a very different way than their parents had done.  About this time, she had her first manic episode – perhaps becoming terribly excited about all that they had in mind, but then she crashed, and he was devastated as he tried to console her with little effect.  He used his charm and charisma as best he could, and she returned to a more stable mood in her own time, and had their first child or perhaps decided to resume having children – perhaps her first depressive episode was a postpartum depression. 

They had six kids total, giving each of them a unique name to help them understand that they were unique in the universe.  Meanwhile her moods became less and less reliable and her lows included suicidal thoughts that she found more and more difficult to manage.  During her slide into less controlled behavior, they tried various ways of managing the environment as if that would help her symptoms resolve.  Ultimately, they moved “off the grid” into a remote and beautiful wooded area, and built a rustic but highly functional camp.  It was as if the ills of society were what was causing the ills in Leslie’s mind.  They “home schooled” the children – having them read the classics as a means of learning everything from math to political science, with a very heavy dose of philosophy based on communist and other liberal principles that were concerned with concentrating too much wealth in the hands of very few privileged people. 

The education was not just about books, however.  The children went through rigorous physical regimens on a daily basis to get them in top physical form.  The parents were very careful to be truthful to the point of being blunt with their children as a means of treating them with respect.  That said, the children became increasingly socially isolated and lived in a cocoon that did not reflect the “real” world.  They were book (and survival – each of them used knives and bows and arrows with skill) smart but socially awkward when interacting with people outside the family and their knowledge of the current social world was nil.

So, when we are introduced to the family, they are processing, confronting, and beginning to work on coming to grips with the loss of their mother.  The opening scene includes the eldest son who is about 18 using a disguise to stalk and kill a deer with his knife.  This is a rite of passage marking his becoming an adult.  Meanwhile, their father is told by his father-in –law that if he comes to the funeral he will be arrested.  The family must decide whether to travel across the country to go their mother’s funeral.  Of course they do – with adventures along the way as they interact with people from a culture that is wholly unknown to them (one of the younger children asks what’s wrong with all the people whom they see who are clearly ill because they are so fat and bloated – and we are stunned to see the people that we see every day through new eyes) and we get to know them by how they interact with each other and with the world.  The children have very different interests and styles and different reactions to their mother’s death.  Some are scared, and one, Rellian (played by Nicholas Hamilton), is angry, lashing out at the father repeatedly and blaming him for their mother’s death.

Physically, the father resembles Charlie Manson, and there are more than a few cult-like aspects to the family’s existence.  But there is also a great deal of warmth.  The experience of watching the film is captured by a daughter’s description to her father of what reading Lolita is like.  She says something like, what is disturbing about the book is that the reader comes to understand and appreciate the mind of the child molester so that the molestation, while on the one hand gross, is, on the other hand, not just understandable, but you are sympathetic to the love that the molester is offering – and this is disturbing.  In this film, we are witness to the warmth Ben feels towards his children – we envy them the family that they have – and we are appalled by Ben’s tyrannical parenting – and his off the wall behavior.  When he feigns a heart attack in a rural grocery store so that the distraction frees the kids to “liberate” necessary grocery items, we are taken aback at the immoral actions that he is teaching from a highly moral perch.  We haven’t quite bought into American Capitalism as the Sheriff of Nottingham’s corrupt and arbitrary treatment of the king’s subjects that he would have us buy into – and that he is foisting off on his children.

At one point, Rellian objects to a critical component of the system; that they celebrate Noam Chomsky’s birthday rather than Christmas.  Ben invites Rellian to articulate more fully what he means – and he says that if Rellian can convince him, he is happy to reconsider.  Rellian – all of fourteen and too angry to think straight - turns away – and as open and genuine as Ben appears to be – we know that Rellian is right to do this because he is the fly being invited by the spider to argue the he would not be a good dinner – for as smart as he might be, his father is much smarter and, at least at that moment, the other kids are on Dad’s side and will lend him support. 

Rellian ends up finding an ally in his Grandfather, Lisa’s Dad, who is outraged by Ben’s shenanigans.  Rellian defects, and Jack Bertrang (masterfully played by FrankLangella) uses this wedge to demand that Ben give up custody of the kids.  And this creates the first flaw in the movie – Ben agrees.  He confesses to the kids that he did, in fact, contribute to Leslie’s death.  And, even though the two times that she visits him as a ghost the warmth between them is obvious, he seems to lose the connection to both her and to the kids at this moment.  He drives away from Jack’s mansion crying tears, but I, who cry at Coke commercials, could muster no tears.  This moment felt false.  He would not give the children up without a much bigger fight (yes, he was outgunned, but when had that stopped him before?).

I think this plot flaw – like the moment in a dream that is so incredulous it almost wakes us up - was introduced to manage what was an unmanageable element in the “reality” of the relationship with the family.  It is a moment when the underlying fantasy – the hope that, as David Letterman put it in his interview with Jerry Seinfeld, our children will grow up to be just like us – in his case, to sit on the couch next to him and like the same shows that he does – runs up against the equally powerful reality (and, in the case of this father who intentionally gave each of his children unique names) that our children will become the people that they become – people that they carve out, not just of us (even if we limit almost all competition, as Ben has done) but of everything they have come in contact with. 

The flaw in the film is that this is presented as an absolute rather than an ambivalent break.  Now, the psychological truth of the matter is that we experience these breaks as absolute.  Our children’s rejection of us – the system’s rejection of us – our failures – are not experienced as complex and nuanced reactions to us, but as complete and utter rejections.  In these moments, we are utterly unworthy – utterly hopeless.  We are (in one way of reading suicide) guilty of a sin punishable by death.  In this moment, we are utterly alone and irredeemable.  And the movie presents that internal state as an external reality – one that Ben acts on rather than defends against.  He acts as if he is as helpless in the face of Rellian as Rellian was in confronting him earlier in the movie.

The next flawed moment is when, seemingly days later, the children emerge from their hiding place in the family bus to rejoin him – they have snuck out of the castle of the evil grandfather – even Rellian is among them – and Ben is reunited with all of them – including Rellian.  They are one big happy family again – and in the epilogue, we see that Ben has learned the error of his ways – they are still the absurdly close and obedient family – but he is now, through his benevolence – supporting them in connecting with the world.  His Eden does not have to be quite so separate from the real world, but it can still exist, and they are still obedient and delightful, but diligently engaged, children.

This analysis has, I fear, drained some of the magic from what is an enchanting film – one that is a kind of counterculture Sound of Music.  Unfortunately, a counterculture world of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens brings with it the very authoritarian strains that it would overthrow; our efforts to manage the wayward children that we have – whether actual children or the conflicting thoughts and feelings that stir within us – require order and organizing to accomplish what we want to – and this involves conflict and compromise, but also disappointment and failure – as well as triumph.  Living is a messy business.  The director, who wrote this movie (and who is likely, like all directors and strivers in general, likely a bit of a control freak), can’t quite keep all the light and beauty that he would like to in Eden.  It turns out that it recreates the complex world that it would distance itself from.

Ultimately the film does track well as a dream – it resolves the conflict that Ben (and the director) feel between raising children that are not polluted by the dominant culture – and therefore isolating them – which is something that they will resent the father for doing, but also enriches them – and makes them, in some very real sense, superior to those around them – and for this the children will be grateful.  The ambivalence that is felt – and the love that somehow binds this ambivalence into a package that binds them together – does get represented.  But we need to remember that this is a dream that is being presented and that the edges of the reality that our twisted efforts to raise and direct our children will bring more mess than the idyll presented here and we, including the reluctant stepdaughter, the reluctant wife and I, will have to figure out how to deal with that.

Post script:  There is something about this film that galls me and makes me feel old and cynical at the same time.  For all of its counterculture feel - and for all of its anti-Trump foment (not explicitly but implicitly), it mirrors something about the Trump phenomenon.  This is a film made by and about people of tremendous privilege - privilege afforded them by a culture and a country that has at its roots a constitution that supports a balance of power because absolute power corrupts absolutely - that is a celebration of - not anarchy - but imposition of a kind of authority that is exceptional - this authority - whether that of Trump or that of the extreme left - is an exception because it knows what the proper way to live/ to govern/ to be is.  In fact, much to the chagrin of a naive and conceptually driven guy like me who wants to live in a Utopian world, there is no such place.  

Perhaps it is the oldest son's experience of proposing undying love to the first girl he kisses - someone that he meets in a KOA campground on the way to the funeral - that captures the frailty and tenacity of the idealism of all Americans, myself included.  I have known idealists who are cynical - back to the landers, disaffected children of immigrants, and my own more suburban version - and we all to a person think that this could be such a better place than it is.  And thank God we do - it keeps us working towards making that place better - but none of us should be given absolute control of it.  Without a balancing opposition - one that is not cowed as Killian originally was - we who are running it will run it into the ground.  We all need to be on board for this bus to work...

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