Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2016

The Contenders:

Viggo Mortensen: Captain Fantastic
Denzel Washington: Fences
Andrew Garfield: Hacksaw Ridge
Ryan Gosling: La La Land
Casey Affleck: Manchester by the Sea (winner)

Culture Shock

Film: Captain Fantastic
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.

A few years ago, the documentary Surfwise showed up on the 1001 Movies list. If memory serves, it vanished the next year. The movie was about an unusual family in the sense of how the children were raised. They were almost feral, destitute, uneducated, and evidently fabulous surfers. Their parents had adopted a strange, communal lifestyle that emphasized the family over attaching themselves to society at large. It was my most common thought while watching Captain Fantastic, a film that concerns a family very similar in a lot of ways.

Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) lives in the forest in the Pacific Northwest with his six children. When I say they live in the forest, I mean that in a literal sense. They have shelters, but they hunt and scavenge food and Ben instructs them in both forestcraft and educates them on virtually every topic. It’s soon clear that the person missing is their mother. Ben and oldest son Bodevan (George MacKay) head to the closest point of civilization to more or less check in. It turns out that Ben’s wife Leslie (Trin Miller) has been hospitalized for bipolar disorder and has, the night before Ben calls in to family, killed herself.