If one has more than a passing interest in the subject of family life and homeschooling, one would likely be intrigued by the 2016 film Captain Fantastic. If one harbors these interests, one would likely be oblivious to the goings-on of popular culture and the film awards circuit and only discover the film randomly, years after its release, chancing upon it through the public library.
The premise is what keeps many a homeschooling mother awake at night: how weird is too weird? Would it be best to remove children from society as much as possible, attempting to construct a back-to-nature, literature-heavy, unique curriculum with no I-phones, electricity, or desks? How involved should parents be in the personal development and education of their children? Will your homeschooled children be freaks incapable of ordinary social interaction at the end of this experiment?
Captain Fantastic provides no insight on these questions. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as Ben, leader of the Cash family, a rugged outdoorsman, guitar-playing, literature-loving Communist. With six weird kids raised in remote isolation on a family compound, Ben boards his bus named “Steve” and heads to New Mexico to rescue the dead body of his wife who killed herself so he can cremate her and flush her down a toilet. How does an interesting premise—the outcome of homeschooling—make for such a terrible film?
The trouble it seems is in faulty premises. Rather than being a drama, the film is pure fantasy. For starters, can you think of any hardline leftists who homeschool as a singular family unit? There are not many that make themselves known to the world.
Christian homeschoolers are another story. They are many and they follow many of the idyllic practices displayed in the film. The idea that a devotee of Chairman Mao would want to live as part of an isolated family is farcical. Mulling over the forces of class oppression do not inspire people to kill bucks with a hunting knife or scale sheer rock faces amidst thunderstorms. There are some self-described Christian Communists, as Maria Von Trapp described herself, who operate as isolated units, but there is a certain emphasis on the “Christian” aspect to make the family unit coherent.
Why filmmaker Matt Ross settled on such an implausible and ridiculous setup seems to be a lack of critical thinking. A piece about the film claims Ross “hesitates” to claim the story is autobiographical. He said, “There are elements of my life, but it has so much less to do with me; it’s more about the kind of father I want to be.” Apparently, the similarities have something to do with living in teepees and his mom being part of starting a Waldorf school. That’s alternative to the mainstream but also nothing like being self-sufficient and living off the land while being homeschooled by your parents.
Ross continued, “I was thinking a lot about what it means to be a parent, and what the values are my wife and I want to pass on to our children. I wanted to put that in a narrative form and ask those questions about what it means when you’re responsible for another person and begin to curate their life.”
To create a narrative that asked such probing questions, one would do well to have robust characters whose actions and words corresponded with reality. Mortensen is, as reviews tend to admit, a very good actor, and despite a thin script, he succeeds in having interesting, even touching moments with the children in the film. The children, however, are only props. They are not given license in the script to be living, breathing, feeling beings who are more than simply curated and sent out to regurgitate their parents’ ironically bourgeois socialism.
In order to create good fiction, the real world is the best place to start. Not all stories need to be close to real-life events, but some grounding in reality goes a long way to crafting a compelling story. Once you look around and realize that Communists don’t often homeschool in survivalist conditions, you might have the bright idea to find families who have done something in the real world and see what their results have been.
Look, for example, at the tragic outcome of Tasha Tudor’s larger than life experiment in nineteenth century New England farming. From the outside, it was perfection. Fans from around the world were and still are captivated by her way of life, her perceived authenticity, and her commitment to a beautiful way of life.
Several of her four children were decidedly less enamored. They that lived the most idyllic childhood of gardens, corgis, marionettes, and no electricity were bitterly divided in the end. Not the blinding wound and grief of a parent’s suicide but the more common pain of divorce led to a fractured family, squabbling over money, mystified by each other’s actions and refusing to yield unrelenting grudges. Imagine if it had been suicide, allegedly exacerbated by the experimental living situation? Such dysfunction and ideological myopia are not solved with a brief chat and a quick hug, as Ross’s movie would have us believe. Such wounds consume entire lifetimes, breeding estrangement and pain too deep for words.
Perhaps most troubling in Captain Fantastic is the glibness with which the mother’s suicide is treated. There is a moment of believable emotion, but the children quickly accept facile explanations about serotonin and reassure their father that they know he tried his best.
Ross claimed, “In a way this film is aspirational. I wish I was selfless enough to devote my life to my children’s lives, even if the film asks if that is wise.” The film is fantastical in that it creates children to be unquestioning surrogates of the parents’ ideas who exist to affirm their parents. Beyond Tasha Tudor, anecdotes abound of isolated, rigid, ideologically obsessed homeschool families. Many of them are Christian (thus apparently invisible to Ross except as the object of ridicule). Many of the children grow up to be atheists. This litmus test should indicate something to a filmmaker dreaming up this aspirational movie.
Ross attempts to justify himself saying, “I used to say that I wanted to make art so girls would like me. And now I want to make art so my children will be proud of me.” Wrongly described as “polished and relatable,” “luminous and enriching,” the film is a pathetic attempt to soothe the anxieties of immature parents. Your children owe you nothing, and they are unlikely to be proud of you. The anger and sadness they feel in the face of misfortune and the fallen world will not be quickly moved to understanding by the type of convenient explanations favored by jaded adults. If you expect to have an understanding pat on the back from your offspring who know that, whatever the outcome, you tried really hard, disappointment awaits.
Sadly, Ross seems convinced of his own success with this endeavor. At the time of the movie’s release, he said, “With this movie, I said over and over again, These are real people, this is the real world, this is happening, this is not a fantasy.” While he may have said that, he failed to reflect it in his film. Part of the trouble seems to be that the film’s creative team was more interested in creating an authentic survivalist outpost and contemplating how anyone could live in such extremes. That’s interesting as a standalone subject but is not the substance of a good story about people.
What is most confusing about the film is the largely positive critical reception and the 10-minute standing ovation it received at Cannes. Sure, the film had some charming cinematography and a decent score, but the piss-poor writing renders it a garbage movie. A possible explanation is the alienation from real children our culture has experienced. With only a child or two a piece, or none at all, the critics might be drawn in by the few authentic moments of family camaraderie in the film and think that the absurdly unrealistic emotional arc of the movie somehow makes sense.
If Captain Fantastic intrigued one, and one searched the vast repositories of the internet for information about the film before sacrificing precious hours of one’s life watching an atrocious attempt to feel coddled by one’s own children, one has no one to blame but oneself. Should have heeded the warning of the Guardian review: “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.” Leave it to the British, with their acerbic wit, to cut through the promotional hype and tell it like it is.
Verdict on this exploration of homeschooling: don’t waste your time.
