Captain Fantastic

Liz and I still have tears in our eyes from seeing one of the oddest, and most moving films we have seen in a while- Captain Fantastic. The subject of the film is a counter cultural family composed of a father and six children, living off the grid, which is forced to re-enter the real world when they attend the funeral of the mother of the family, who left to have treatment for severe mental illness and then died by slitting her wrists. The six home schooled children, and their insane but brilliant father, are some of the most memorable characters you will ever see in film, especially when you juxtapose them with so called "normal" people who simply don't know what to do with their intellect, their courage, their revolutionary ideals, and their naivete about everything from cell phones to video games to sex. Though the excesses of Sixties utopianism as embodied by this family,give the film its humor, the moral superiority of those ideals relative to the normal, day to day, values of contemporary American life give the film a haunting subtext. Viggo Mortensen as the father is incandescent, infuriating, and impossibly sexy, but the children, all six of them, are shining stars that light up the screen. And despite the pain and heartbreak depicted in so many portions of this film, its ultimate message is one of the moral force of revolutionary idealism and the power of love. Which moved me and Liz to tears. As we still, in our own way, hold on to our Sixties Dream