Captain Fantastic (2016) Viggo Mortensen – Movie Review

Viggo Mortensen stars as Ben Cash, a father of six (ages range from six to eighteen), living “off the grid” in the remote dense wilderness of the Pacific Northwest as part of some sort of self-imposed counterculture exile, where they live off mostly of what’s out in nature in a ritualistic fashion — hunting, farming, rock climbing, survivalist training, and keeping physically fit, as well as mentally agile, learning from some of the great thinkers and philosophers, some quite revolutionary and controversial, the world has ever known. They’re all anxiously awaiting his bipolar wife Leslie to be cured of a disease during her hospital stay back in her home town in New Mexico when word comes that she has taken her own life. Though father-in-law Jack, who blames Ben for poisoning his daughter and grandchildren with his cultish hippie beliefs, explicitly tells him to stay away or get arrested, he packs the family bus and the septet vacate their bohemian digs and are off on the long road trip to crash the funeral. The kids, who’ve spent their entire lives away from any form of other civilization not found in their novels and textbooks, find so-called civilized society to be a crazier place than they’ve ever imagined.