Captain Fantastic -- OC impressionistic movie review

My dad was no Viggo Mortensen.    

He quit school in the fourth grade and smoked like a brick chimney, tall and square, but crumbling. He was good at math, and he could read more than he let on, but he left my schoolteacher mom to take care of all that stuff, and the meals, and the house, and the kids. Still, he hoed the tobacco and milked the cows – every damn day, not matter how hot the sun or how cold the wind – and he took us to the woods and showed us what he knew about trees and herbs, and he taught us to shoot (rifles, not arrows), and how to split wood, and how to drive a nail, and how to change a tire. Time was, we as a culture wouldn't have asked more of a man than that. Rock climbing? Knife fighting? Conflict resolution? Chomskian social dynamics? That would have been science fiction, like the M13 Salt Vampire that scared the crap out of four-year-old me during Saturday afternoon reruns of Star Trek.   

And yet, there were similarities.    

There were long diatribes about the unfairness of taxes, and the dishonesty of politicians (though he never actually voted, for fear of being called to serve on a jury, which would take him away from the farm). There was a strong sense of moral superiority, because he didn't drink, or gamble, or kill for sport. The free whiskey he brought home from the tobacco market he combined with rock candy, glycerin, honey, and lemon to make cough syrup (couldn't not take it, any more than he could turn down the twine for the tobacco bales – it was free).   

The thing that struck me about Captain Fantastic was that only one of his six children hated him, and even that one took it back at the end of the movie. Even if (and I mean that if, because I'm not sure) everything he put his children through was as much in service of his own ego as the ideas he was promoting, they grew strong from it, rather than being beaten down. The girls, especially, maybe even more than the boys. He offered them chances to change his mind, although the method for doing so was rigged in favor of those who were more verbally articulate. Those kids argued with their father when they felt it was necessary, without fear of being belittled, or whipped (which involves ritual, and feels very different from being attacked, in the unpredictable-but-inevitable sense of honest-to-god abuse).   

All in all, it was a pretty awesome movie.