Captain Fantastic (2016): Film Review

First things first: this is not a comedy. It’s funny in parts, but it’s not ‘dark comedy’ or ‘absurdist comedy’ or any of those other variants often touted out when they really mean ‘indie movie with artistic pretentions’.  

What it is though is an at-all-times interesting tale about a grieving husband (played admirably by Viggo Mortenson) and his ragtale bunch of home-schooled warrior children (all equally brilliant in their respective roles) on a mission to rescue the body of their dead mother from her Christian parents to cremate her in accordance with their wishes.

Captain Fantastic (2016)

While the premise is quirky enough to set your indie feelers tingling, the backstory is what gives it character: the kids have all been born and raised isolated from conventional society- in a remote farm when they were young and since then in their own little private settlement in a forest. Every day, they wake up and train themselves to scale mountains and hunt wild game and incapacitate human attackers. As Papa Fantastic puts it, their physical fitness would put the world’s most elite athletes to shame.

It’s not just their muscles that get the daily workout either. When they’re not skinning animals for cardigans or breaking into impromptu jams (they’re all virtuoso musicians as well), they’re walking talking Wikipedia pages on any topic under the sun- communism, the black plague, the bill of rights, you name it.

This sort of Coming-To-America set up should guarantee at least a few guffaws when the family comes into contact with the outside world, if not a few great insights into the naturalism vs consumerism debate. But Captain Fantastic does neither because it tries too hard to do both. Especially in one cringe-worthy family rendition of Sweet Child O' Mine around their matriarch’s funeral pyre.

Either that, or the film makers bought into their own message so thoroughly that they felt it would be beneath themselves to even argue their case. The result is that the only argument Captain Fantastic seems to pose against consumerism is the movie itself- “hey, look what can be done when a movie is not made on a big studio budget!”.  The best thing about Captain Fantastic, as I mentioned in the beginning, is that it is, at all times, interesting. The irony is that ‘interesting’ is the one word banned in the Fantastic household. ‘Interesting’ is, as their captain puts it, a non-word: it doesn’t express how the speaker feels. Well neither does the movie.