Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav) is a young man in a poor village in India. With poverty and corruption all around him, he decides to make a better life for himself. I manages to become the chauffeur of the son of a rich man, who just returned to India after living in the United States, with his American girlfriend by his side.

As the servant class is trained to do, he makes himself indispensable to his master. When trouble arises, however, the rich family betrays him and sets him up to be the fall guy to save themselves. He realizes that the class system is rigged against him, and corruption is keeping him low. Eventually he rebels and becomes his own kind of master.

The irony is that in order to escape poverty, overt oppression, and a corrupt system, he has to become corrupt himself.

And so he does.

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Martha (Vanessa Kirby) and Sean (Shia LeBeouf) are a young and loving couple in Boston, awaiting their first baby. The room is ready. The expecting mother is radiant. Sean works in heavy construction, currently building a large bridge. When he comes home he becomes a doting husband and excited father to be. They are planning on a birth at their home, assisted by a midwife.

During the birth, things go unexpectedly wrong, and the baby dies minutes after birth. Their lives change as they are each independently trying to cope with the terrible loss. Her own mother, a domineering and challenging woman, meddles and makes Martha’s life even more impossible. Everything comes to the breaking point.

This movie is challenging to watch. The extensive birth section at a the beginning sets the stage. It is, by far, the most graphic and realistic birth scene I have ever watched. You’re right in the room with them, especially when the baby’s heartbeat starts slowing down.

I am not sure if I would recommend to young couples who are expecting childbirth to watch this, or not. I can say for sure, they’ll learn a lot.

The story is about the human spirit, and how it eventually transcends challenges. But it’s not a happy movie at all.

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Ben and Leslie Cash live somewhere in the mountains in the State of Washington, off the grid, in cabin in the woods, with their six children. They gave each of the children a made-up name so they would be unique in the world. Their names are Bodevan, Kielyr, Vespyr, Rellian, Zaja and Nai.

The children are homeschooled and unregistered. Even though they have no academic record whatsoever, the 8-year-old can recite the Bill of Rights and give an interpretation. The oldest, Bodevan, has been accepted at Harvard, Stanford and another 10 top universities. Ben is a survivalist and socialist. He teaches his children how to survive in the wild, by hunting, identifying edible plants, and growing their own food. The children have taken it all in and are remarkable each in their own way.

Leslie was a lawyer who gave up her practice to raise the children with their ideals. But she is bi-polar, and her illness starts escalating after giving birth to her first son. Even though he does not believe in modern medicine, Ben sends his wife to get treatment in a hospital near where her sister lives.

While at the hospital, Leslie commits suicide.

The family that can survive anything is almost broken by the loss of their mother. That’s when their battle with the “real world” starts.

In today’s gross-national-product-world, Captain Fantastic depicts a family that tossed it all away in favor of a simpler, yet much harder and harsher world. The elaborate idealism of facing the truth, no matter how adverse, how inconvenient, and how disturbing it might be, will work to some degree, but in the end the children all try to find their own balance and their own way. The question is, can Ben face that reality?

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Five years ago I read and reviewed the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing. It’s a documentary about Ernest Shackleton, the English explorer who, in 1914, wanted to be the first to cross Antarctica on foot, whose ship Endurance was eventually crushed by the ice, leaving the entire crew stranded on the ice in the Antarctic winter.

Shackleton’s Captain tells the same story, through the eyes of Captain Frank Worsley, who signed up to Shackleton’s expedition to sail the ship. As it turned out, his navigation skills and seamanship was what eventually saved the crew.

The book was graphic and captivating. The movie is a documentary with dramatization, sprinkled with actual film footage and still photographs of the voyage. After watching the film, I must say that while the visual story is strong and powerful, I got more out of it having read the book and being familiar with all the details, which can never be shown in a movie.

I highly recommend both.

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Bella and Hector are a reclusive couple who live at a remote farm in the mountains of New Zealand at the end of a dirt road. Bella is a cheery, upbeat person in whose world nobody can do wrong. Hector is a curmudgeon who almost never speaks. He just growls and frowns, and occasionally goes out to hunt a wild boar in the jungle.

Ricky is a foster boy in care of the government child services in the city. His child services officer and a policeman bring him to live with Bella and Hector. Ricky wants nothing to do with them at first, but quickly gets into the rhythm of country life and enjoys the simple routines and respect he gets from them.

When Bella passes away unexpectedly, Ricky and Hector, an impossible pair, have to make things work. Hector does not want to release Ricky back to child services and to an orphanage, and the two flee into the woods.

Soon they are the object of a national manhunt.

I got a kick out of the woods and mountains of New Zealand. I know that Lord of the Rings was filmed there. The woods are entirely different, both in fauna and flora, from what I am used to here in the west of the United States. We have great mountains, wild woods, but they look and feel very different here. New Zealand has no dangerous predators, except wild boars, and after watching a wild boar charge in this movie, I think I’ll deal with a mountain lion instead anytime – well maybe.

The Hunt for the Wilderpeople does not even try to be realistic. It’s a comedy, and it’s hilarious to watch. Ricky, played expertly by Julian Dennison, is a crack-up character, and eventually becomes a mini-Hector. Once I realized it would be a quirky movie, I enjoyed it immensely. I gave it an extra star just for the fact that the movie does not take itself very seriously.

Just sit back and enjoy. You won’t regret it. And while you’re there, enjoy cool New Zealand with its Wilderpeople.

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