But he’s not the first person to shut out the complications of family in favor of no-strings-attached strangers. Since Chris never had a phone and this was the pre-Internet age, they just had to drive to his old Atlanta apartment and be told by a stranger that their son had left.

He hit the road in a beat-up Datsun, cut up his social security card, burned his money and went on a two-year cross country journey to Alaska.Īngry with his parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), he gave himself a two month head start before allowing the post office to return their letters to sender. McCandless is - was - an upper-middle class Emory graduate who decided to veer off the established path. He knows him as Alex, though the full alias is Alexander Supertramp.

The young vagabond stranger is Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), but Franz doesn’t know that. Because Hal Holbrook’s face is achingly beautiful, never more so than in “Into the Wild” when his Ron Franz is asking - near begging - a young vagabond stranger to be his grandson. Someone once told me about a local Barnes & Noble employee who went around the store asking people to choose: “beautiful” or “achingly beautiful”? My unromantic adverb alarm went off and I picked beautiful.

Wild at heart book review