There’s a meaty whiff of phoney-baloney in this fatuous and tiresome movie, replete with forced emotional crises and wrong notes, topped off with an excruciatingly unearned, sentimental ending. It’s a low-cal version of Peter Weir’s 1986 movie The Mosquito Coast, starring someone who is essentially a cross between Charles Manson and Captain von Trapp.
Ben (a blandly conceited performance by Viggo Mortensen) has taken his six children away from America’s soul-rotting consumerist nonsense to live a tough, pure survivalist lifestyle in the forests of the Pacific Northwest – drilling them to athletic perfection and teaching them about Chomsky and Dostoyevsky. But his uncompromising demands have taken their toll on the children’s mother, who is now in hospital, and causes a terrible confrontation with Ben’s reactionary father-in-law, Jack (Frank Langella).
So is Ben a creepy authoritarian cult leader or quixotic countercultural hero? Perhaps we are supposed to believe he’s a charismatic mix of the two. But it’s fudged, and there is something wildly and unintentionally pompous and preposterous about Ben, who is against “organised religion” but appears to think Buddhism is somehow ethically and intellectually superior to Christianity. This is a macho story of men’s intellectual development: Ben’s son, Bo (George MacKay) is the putative academic star; the sisters aren’t important and, in this film, women are either irrelevant, saintly or dead.
