Just Seen: Into the Wild

Absolutely stunning directorial work from Sean Penn. I have been a long-time fan of his work, both acting and directing, and this film has even further cemented his status of a solid cinematographer.
A straightforward story, quite banal and trivial, is told with such a great panache and with such masterstrokes of narrative efficiency, that I quickly stopped paying attention to all the pompous insanity of the original material.
Eddie Vedder's songs are extremely appropriate to the brooding intensity of the visual row, which prepares us for the gradual reduction of palette to Alaskan plains. No wonder that Sean Penn himself donned a camera throughout the movie.
It's a MUST SEE movie, but strangely not for the reasons the press praises it. I am glad that this feeble material of a runaway boy at odds with civilization and who read pathetic and sentimental Tolstoy too late in his life to make odds and ends of his weird life. I am still not sure what the moral of his life, what the lesson we are supposed to learn from his life - that it is ok to run away, that one should read flora guides more carefully, that life in a cabin prepares one either for an early death, or imprisonment after instanity, like in the case of an Unabomber?