Captain Fantastic

Review by Pamela Zoslov

Matt Ross, the 46-year-old writer and director of CAPTAIN FANTASTIC, is a memorable character actor with a flair for eccentric roles.

On HBO's "Big Love," he played Alby Grant, the murderous, closeted gay son of a Mormon cult patriarch. Ross's childhood gave him a natural affinity for stories about nontraditional sects. He lived with his "hippie mom" in nature communes in California, sleeping in a teepee.

Yet in interviews, Ross insists that CAPTAIN FANTASTIC, which stars Viggo Mortensen as Ben Cash, a father of six raising his brood "off the grid" in the forests of the Pacific Northwest — is not autobiographical. In fact all writing, and all art, is to some extent autobiographical, especially that which rhymes so musically with the artist's life.

Far From Men (now on video)

All hail Viggo Mortenson as the American answer to Max Von Sydow, that is to say, a serious and thoughtful-seeming actor who can go from all-star escapism and fluff such as HIDALGO and the LORD OF THE RINGS films to way off-the-beaten-track foreign fare, personal projects and “art” films. Now watch, Mortenson will show up as a cartoon bad guy or cape-wearer in a Justice League movie, shaking his fist and saying “I’ll get you Wonder Woman!” and I will be begging Bob Ignizio to take down this posting. Or at least put his own by-line on it. I’m so sick of comic-book movies.

The multi-lingual Mortenson stars and co-produced (for iconic French studio Pathe) the French- and Arabic-language drama FAR FROM MEN, which represents director David Delhoffen’s decent expansion of the Albert Camus short story “The Guest,” on which generations of high-school students such as I had been weaned (to all my fellow former high-school French students, anyone found any jobs out there? I’m still looking).

Unlike similar attenuations of short-story material, this one doesn’t feel terribly padded, even if it does bring some sex and more violence into the tale than Camus did.