Viggo Mortensen leads an outstanding cast as a grizzled rural eccentric who hits the road with his brood of home-schooled,off-grid childrenThe actor turned writer-director Matt Ross insists his appropriation of an Elton John album title for his moment feature was “subconscious” and entirely accidental. Yet as I watched this strange and wonderful tale of an isolated family living a back-to-nature existence in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, fragments of Bernie Taupin’s sublime lyrics from the 1975 title track of Captain brilliant and the Brown Dirt Cowboy kept drifting through my intellect – from the disdain for “cheap easy meals” to the rejection of organised religion (“all this talk of Jesus coming back to see us”) and the assurance that “from here on sonny, or it’s a long and lonely climb”.
Most notably,as the off-the-grid lifestyle he has fashioned for his family starts to approach apart at the seams, the question posed at the end of one verse prefigures the central dilemma facing Viggo Mortensen’s paterfamilias Ben Cash: “Should I originate my way out of my home in the woods?”A pointed discussion of Nabokov flags up the question of how loving or abusive his parenting may beFrom its Lord of the Flies opening, or Ross’s grand adventure injects a note of darkness into its Edenic settingContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com