At its core, Captain Fantastic is a quirk-heavy dramedy of culture clash, as Ben and his family are forced to re-enter the world they have rejected—which might as well be another dimension—when he learns that Leslie, in a fit of depression, has killed herself. Leslie comes from a wealthy, conservative family, and her father (Frank Langella) has barred Ben from attending the funeral in New Mexico. Ben is incensed because Leslie was a Buddhist whose last will and testament dictated that she be cremated, but her father intends to follow through with a traditional funeral in a church followed by burial. Thus, Ben and his brood decide to go on a mission to save her from this desecration of her last wishes, which brings them back into the world of banks, grocery stores, and fast-food restaurants, as well as various family members whose cozy suburban existence represents the very kind of existential meaninglessness that Ben is seeking to combat with his unorthodox childrearing in the woods.

Ben’s left-leaning worldview is strict and unrelenting, and it is not surprising that those outside his children view him as potentially dangerous and abusive, although the attitude the film takes toward these combative characters, particularly the father-in-law played by Langella, is so negative that it is hard to take their criticisms seriously. Despite his ideological rigor, Ben at one point offers a dissenting child the opportunity to make an argument for why they should celebrate Christmas instead of their own made-up Noam Chomsky Day. On its face it is an opening for dialogue, but it really isn’t because the dissenting child is so clearly in the minority, with his entire family so openly stacked against him, that he can’t bring himself to utter a word. Ben presents himself as a purveyor of truth, but in reality he will entertain no dissension, which by definition makes him a dictator.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Captain Fantastic. Matt Ross, an actor-turned-writer/director who is probably best known right now for playing Gavin Belson on the television series Silicon Valley (2014–), is a fine filmmaker who has a solid sense of character and narrative rhythm, but he is too in love with Ben’s against-the-grain character and worldview. A more interesting take on the material might have viewed Ben with a more critical, or at least skeptical, eye, even if it ultimately sided with him against the rest of the world. So much of what Ben says rings true, especially about the dominance of corporations and commerce over humanity and the way we have insulated ourselves from the natural world, but the extremity with which he lives and forces his children to live poses all kinds of problems that Ross is simply unwilling to deal with. There are a few plot developments that call Ben into question, particularly his oldest son Bo’s (George MacKay) desire to go to college and his 12-year-old son Rellian’s (Nicholas Hamilton) growing disenchantment with being isolated from the rest of the world, but these are all neatly resolved in a way that never really poses a challenge to Ben’s dogma.

As played by Mortensen, a gifted actor whose expressive face is to put to particularly good use here, Ben is a loving father who genuinely cares for his children and wants the best for him, which is why the more extreme aspects of his dictatorial approach to family still feel loving, rather than cultish or abusive (two things of which outsiders accuse him). Yet, at various points he comes across like a hypocritical bully, and Ross makes the mistake of playing it for laughs. For example, in one scene Ben and his family are in a bank, and one of the children comments on all the overweight people he sees, asking if they are “sick.” Another child reminds them that they shouldn’t make fun of other people, which imparts a reasonable and timely message about the escalating issue of obesity in the United States—it is a health problem that is exacerbated by modern sedentary lifestyles, convenience, and bad food, but it is still unkind to mock others who look different. “Yes, we don’t make fun of people,” Ben reiterates, after which another child chimes in, “Except Christians,” which Ross treats as the scene’s punchline.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that Ben and his family, who have adopted a primitive lifestyle that rejects the kind of material consumption and accumulation of wealth espoused by certain evangelical Christians, particularly those like Joel Osteen who follow the so-called “prosperity gospel”; however, the jab is also cheap and fundamentally misguided and ahistorical, as it lumps all Christians into a single monolithic entity that is somehow at odds with Ben’s worldview when, in fact, Christianity as a philosophy adheres to many of the same tenets that Ben and his family purport to uphold. One would think that Ben would encourage his children to be more open-minded in such matters, but the film treats Christianity (and any kind of organized religion) as an easy signifier of what’s wrong with everyone else, a smug approach that undercuts much of the film’s effectiveness.

We see something similar at work in the scene where Ben and his family have dinner with Dave (Steve Zahn) and Harper (Kathryn Hahn), Leslie’s sister and brother-in-law who live exactly the kind of staid suburban existence that Ben overtly rejects. Naturally there is cultural and personal clash, and it doesn’t take long for a seemingly pleasant dinner to devolve into conflict and hurt feelings. There is something meaningful here in the clash of lifestyles and worldviews, but again Ross goes for the easy targets, making Dave and Harper such generic white-bread dullards and their two sons such sneering, shallow products of mindless pop culture that the whole scene collapses on itself. It’s not that there isn’t both drama and comedy to be mined here, but Ross makes the targets so big and obvious for Ben and his family that it feels smugly self-congratulatory (not to mention contrived) when they nail them.

Thankfully, such scenes don’t dominate the film, and there a number of sequences that work quite nicely in conveying the complexities of family—any kind of family—and the challenges parents face in trying to teach their children their own values while also allowing them to experience the world for themselves (a theme that is, interestingly, best encapsulated in the film’s final, wordless shot). The cast, particularly Mortensen and the six actors who play his children, are all excellent, and they create a real sense of connection that helps the film navigate in and around its more overt ideological pitfalls. Captain Fantastic works more than it doesn’t, but it’s hard not to wish that Ross had made his targets a little less broad and his own perspective a little more nuanced so that we could better appreciate what Ben is attempting to do, rather than having it shoved down our throats.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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