Many have argued the political spectrum is not a line, but a circle. As I understand it, when your politics go too far to the right, you end up living in the woods and hunting your food on a daily basis. It would seem the same is true when you go too far to the left as well.
Captain Fantastic is about a freaky left-wing father and the six children he raises in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest all by themselves. As a single parent, Ben (Viggo Mortensen) isn’t quite a Great Santini as close-mindedness goes, but he is a piece of work and an advocate of tough love; each day is a regimen of exercise, combat, and lessons in practical life skills. Each evening is filled with examining educational materials best suited for PhD candidates. Get a load of the eight-year-old who can cite the Bill of Rights verbatim, but is corrected in his efforts because “regurgitation is not comprehension.” The study sessions often yield to music under the moonlight. It’s kind of like if the Partridge Family disavowed society and became Marxists.
I spent the first thrity minutes wondering who this film should appeal to – squatters? Tax dodgers? The dogmatic? The overeducated? People who hunt their own game? This is a film in which the same boy, Bo (George MacKay), slits a deer throat in the opening and thirty minutes later chastises his father on the misuse of “Trotsky-ist” when the latter meant “Trotsky-ite.” Yes, it is fair to say Act I of Captain Fantastic doesn’t exactly endear itself to the downtrodden masses.
Upon reflection, however, I see Captain Fantastic not as a case study of the unrelatable, but instead just the opposite. The film reflects exactly the choices parents, all parents, make. There is philosophy and dogma in everything we choose to share with our children from religion to favorite baseball team. Who is to say, really, that the choice to teach a small boy physics and survival skills while living alone in a hut in the woods is any more screwed up than teaching the same child that city school and communal church are the ideal tools for personal development? Is my way any better than somebody else’s? Why?
And the film knows there’s something inherently wrong in many of the choices Ben has made, yet we can all see how Ben isn’t wrong about everything and what’s considered “normal” isn’t exactly right, either. This is a rich, smart screenplay and perhaps the best cast movie of the year. Ben’s sister and brother-in-law (Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn) are classic middle America “what do we do about this?” types and yet are both overshadowed by Frank Langella as the “let’s end this hippie crap” grandfather.
One of my favorite scenes in the film involves dad quizzing his younger teen daughter on the book she’s selected -on her own- to read, Lolita, a novel in which a middle-age man has a relationship with a girl about her age. When pressed for her thoughts, the girl expresses anger that she’s forced to experience from the perspective of this quasi-pedophile as opposed to the girl herself, yet on reflection her disgust is mixed with a 
sympathy for a man all alone in the world and not always making the correct choices; this is how we feel about Captain Fantastic himself – our love is not unconditional; we see a flawed man making occasionally very bad and perhaps life-crippling choices for his children, and yet we are not without sympathy for either his plight or his motives.
This scene not only serves as analogy for the film in general, but also delivered an awesome writing lesson. The girl’s first response to the “How do you find Lolita?” interrogation is “interesting.” Captain Fantastic correctly identifies “interesting” as a non-word, clearly used here to satisfy the intellectually lazy. From a journalist perspective, interesting is a non-word, an answer to bridge a rhetorical abyss and as such a bridge, it’s less Brooklyn and more like that macramé rope thing Indy mangles with just two or three machete hacks at the end of Temple of Doom. Doing a minimal amount of research, I have used the word “interesting” fifty-two times in just over 1,000 reviews. I apologize for each and every occurrence. I’m sure I meant “excruciating,” “rampage-inducing,” “pants-crapping,” or or something along those lines. If nothing else, I thank the Captain for showing me the error of my ways.
♪I’m livin’ in the wilderness
Somehow the kids are with me, too
Pretty sure there were more before
Think I’ve lost a few
It was grim
Marxism
Was my thing, I would rant and stew
But right now I feel
Wooded appeal
I can speak to
Like a sermon
Preachin’ ev’ry day at this time
Like a sermon
Each day some speech
I can chime
Better not give me sass, boy
Or else you will deliberate
Been saving a rebuttal
That I know you’ll hate♫
Rated R, 118 Minutes
D: Matt Ross
W: Matt Ross
Genre: Growing up freaky
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Parents. Parents who choose.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Those who never question
♪ Parody inspired by “Like a Virgin”
