That Moment In ‘Into The Wild’ When Franz Offers His Name

Into The Wild is a 2007 biographical drama and critical favorite that charts the travels of a young man looking for himself.

THE STORY: In 1990, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) graduates from college and sets out on a personal odyssey after abandoning a more traditional life, yet while most young people take a year off and maybe backpack through Europe, has has more extreme motivation. His goal is to reach the wilds of Alaska, and once there, live off the land. Traveling there from West Virginia, along the way he meets many who connect with his efforts but have no sway on his choice, one that eventually leads to lonely and emotional tragedy.

THE RUNDOWN: The bleak outcome of the now famous tale of McCandles is one that has inspired many to seek understanding as to why he did what did, most probably feeling a bit of longing for the freedom he was after. Penn’s excellent direction and faithful adaptation of the non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer earned the film two Academy Award nominations, with the movie not trying to answer questions but rather documenting the journey of a young man who became obsessed with his passion and then lost in the wilds it brought him. A great and terrible story, it is a truly compelling watch, made more so by its truth.

THAT MOMENT: After cutting up his credit cards and social security cards, rejecting the Harvard life his parents have planned for him, Christopher packs only the essentials and drives off in his battered Datsun B210, heading west where he eventually must abandon even that, hitch-hiking further on. He’s not told his family of his intentions, refusing to keep in touch, surviving on his own from the courtesy of others and the odd jobs he can muster along the way. Despite the hardships, he feels anew, bound for something deeply profound.

Changing his name to Alexander Supertramp, he continues on, encountering kindness in strangers, from hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian H. Dierker) on the road to a working man in South Dakota (Vince Vaughn), to an underage girl named Tracy (Kristen Stewart), who feels great attraction to the wandering man. These people are impactful, but lack any influence. He is ever determined to reach his destiny.

Eventually, he arrives in California where he then meets Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook), an elder man, retired and living alone. Franz sees how the boy is living, residing in a small camping tent in the desert, surviving day-to-day. He is clearly moved by the boy’s situation, especially when Christopher claims he now has no family.

Franz offers the boy a warm meal, bringing him into his home, where he tells him of his life years before in the Army while stationed in Okinawa, where, in the late 1950s, a drunk driver killed his wife and son in a car accident back in the states. It ruined him for a long time, he says, but then he decided to live his life in honor of them, cleaning himself up and devoting himself to being a good person. Since then, he’s lived alone and now busies himself with leathering, a trade that earns him some decent income, but more so, passion.

Over the next few months, Christopher spends more and more time with Franz, learning how to work leather, making a belt that documents his travels west. The two become close, the mentor/parental role Franz holds over the boy one Christopher feels an especially strong bond with. In their time together though, Franz becomes frustrated with why the boy wants so desperately to go to Alaska, asking him what he is running from, to which Christopher claims that it is Franz who is actually running, even though he is stuck in one place, hiding in his little home away from the real world (this is followed by a remarkable scene where Holbrook scales a rather steep and rocky incline to prove he can still have new experiences). “I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone,” he tells the boy.

And so we come to their departure. Christopher plans to leave in the night, to avoid hurting Franz, but the old man hears him stirring and offers the boy a ride the hundred miles away out of the desert to catch a train or car or something elsewhere. He’s put together a care box of helpful gear that might help Christopher on the next leg of his journey, and they drive mostly in silence out of the sands and into the morning, where at last, they must go their separate ways.

Franz pauses a moment and then tells the boy of how he is the last of his family line, he an only child, and his now gone. With great vulnerability and pride welling behind his eyes, he then offers Christopher something truly astounding – his name, asking for permission to adopt McCandless so he can be the family he no longer has. Christopher thanks Franz but says they should discuss it when he returns, the implication clear that this is a thing that will never be. He then walks out into the early haze of a new day and on the snows of the unforgiving wild.

WHY IT MATTERS:

Holbrook earned an Oscar nom for his moving portrayal of Franz, an emotional and deeply centered character that provides McCandless with his final hurdle in abandoning civilization. We see Christopher encounter very specific people in his journey, each who are designed to represent pillars of social stability, from honest hard work to personal responsibility to romantic partnership and more. With Franz, he learns the value of wisdom, which is also the name of the titled on-screen final chapter in the film, “Getting of Wisdom”. These months with Franz are crucial in the last stage of Christopher’s development as he travels across country, experiencing and then rejecting each of these ‘trappings’ per se of our cultural construct, the unfulfilling existence of modern living.

Franz represents everything that Christopher – in his narrow world view – is fearful he will become, an old man with no stories of living, left to isolation in a blank slate of missed opportunities. As mentioned, he even criticizes the older man for not being more adventuresome.

What he fails to see of course, and what we do so well, is that for Franz, his has been a life not of emptiness, but rather great reward, the loss of his wife and son the greatest challenge and adventure he’s ever known, overcoming despair and alcoholism to become a man devoted to their memory and honor. With no one to pass that on to though, he sees perhaps in the boy a chance to give it back in even greater ways, by being a ‘grandfather’ to Christopher, with a home and, most importantly, unconditional love. This moment of invitation is a profoundly moving gesture, lost on a young man too fueled by unrest and blind ambition to see that the real journey is not one of solitude in the woods of Alaska, but in the company of those who welcome you in, accept you for who you are, and share what it means to be truly alive in the human experience. This is a great movie moment.