Mortensen stars as an idealistic survivalist father (Ben) raising six children “off grid and away from contemporary civilisation” (as the Watershed blurb puts it). He lives in remote forest in Washington State where he home schools them to be “fit in body and mind”. The children do outlandish things like read books(!), hunt for their food and justify their personal opinions. A family crisis forces them to re-enter the “normal” world that they’ve been long separated from. It’s a shock to the system: everyone seems to be overweight compared with them… and then there are the mobile phones, the violent video games and the loud music!
All the child actors are rather wonderful and are a perfect bizarre mix of characters (frankly, I wanted to be Captain Fantastic too - some hope!).
I thought it was an absolutely lovely film. It’s poignant and it’s funny… but it also asks hard questions about society and the way we bring up our families in the hard-nosed, selfish, materialistic world we inhabit today.
PS: The family travel around in a lovely, huge, battered bus (appropriately named “Steve”!). It left me feeling quite envious – I want one (and I’d still only need one Residents Parking Zone permit to park outside our house!). Obviously, we would spend most of our time in Leigh Woods and the Forest of Dean…
PPS: It seemed appropriate to see this film at the same time as I’ve been reading Paul Mason’s “Postcapitalism” – in which he suggests we might well be about to enter a whole new world of ‘post capitalism’ – where a technological revolution (something of an alternative ‘knowledge’ revolution) will reshape our lives.
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