CANNES, France (AP) – In the film “Captain Fantastic,” Viggo Mortensen plays one of the all-time great movie dads. In a teepee in remote Washington State, he’s raising six children like a modern-day Swiss Family Robinson. The children, well-behaved and smart, are equally adept at skinning a deer and reading “The Brothers Karamazov” by the campfire. They pine after boning knives like most kid do iPhones.
For audiences at the Cannes Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival (where it first premiered before landing in France), “Captain Fantastic” has resonated as a movie for its time: a heartfelt and comic exploration about whether our hyper-digital, cacophonous lives have strayed from important things.
“It feels like one of those movies that has connected with something related to U.S. society right now,” Mortensen said Wednesday while smoking a cigarette on a Cannes rooftop patio. “People get bewildered and think: ‘I can’t do that. I’m not going to skin a f—ing deer.’ But there are other things you can do.”
The film is the second directing feature for Matt Ross, a veteran actor known to many as Gavin Belson on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” In “Captain Fantastic,” the idyll of the family’s off-the-grid existence is challenged when their mother dies. A bus trip to her New Mexico parents (long critics of their lifestyle choices) confronts the kids with normal American life and teases out questions about their highly educated but socially removed upbringing. Should 8-year-olds really be climbing rock faces?
Ross acknowledges there are some autobiographical aspects to the tale. His mother, he says, was “a seeker” and he grew up partly in alternative living communities. (“They were hippie communes but they weren’t really hippie communes because it was the ’80s,” he jokes.) He has lived in a teepee in the summer and does, like his fictional family, celebrate Noam Chomsky Day. (“He’s my hero,” he says.)