HomeCoronavirus lockdown diaries: Captain Fantastic has some tips for dealing with quarantine

Coronavirus lockdown diaries: Captain Fantastic has some tips for dealing with quarantine

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By Smita Ganguli  March 30, 2020, 12:05:52 AM IST (Updated)

Coronavirus lockdown diaries: Captain Fantastic has some tips for dealing with quarantine
What you are about to read isn’t a review. It is however, an expression of mistrust. Something a majority of us have been feeling over the last few days with the lockdown in force now.


For those of you who haven’t watched Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic yet, why though? Get down to it as soon as possible because this is VIGGO MORTENSEN and that’s all that should matter prior to watching it. If you follow Lord Of The Rings, you’ll know who this guy is.

Far from what society deems are the generics of parenthood, Ben has raised his children in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, Captain Fantastic. These kids have only heard of stories from the land of concrete and skyscrapers. These were stories which were often narrated with a pinch of opinion and dissent. Softheaded and tough, manipulative and honest, all at the same time. And of course, the film has become a personal favourite because it’s one that addresses the very mistrust most of us share, but none able to express.

Captain Fantastic is a telling story of a father by broaching into the empathies of the socio-political spirit of the present day.

Ben Cash, a recent-day shaggy dad of six, has created an ideal kibbutz where everything is hunky-dory and everything is perfect, by definition. Long-haired idealist Ben’s hostility resembles Kaczynski, popularly also known as Unabomber. Ben has trained his children to be hunter-gatherers with variant desires and a variety of weapons. However, the Cash-family limit their consumption, thereby keeping up with the ecological harmony.

One cannot simply overlook the names of the six kids and how that in itself is pointing towards celebrating individuality and not falling for a celebrity fetish of naming one’s kids ‘North West’ and ‘Blue Ivy’. Names like Vespyr, Zaja and Rellian – all sound like names of an antediluvian videogame characters.

Ben’s children are home schooled and have read everything from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to ‘Lolita’. The other side to this is that Ben is a very demanding teacher, almost as demanding as the headmaster of a Jesuit academy.

Ben’s wife who suffers from bipolarity, leads the rest of the family to move to the woods with the cliché belief that moving away from the modern day hustle-bustle would eventually cure her illness, outlining the 70s counterculture psychological analysis of the masses – leading the people to believe that ‘schizophrenia’ in particular, was/is the result of the modern day society and its people.

Ben is constantly building himself up against one single ideology – ‘The powerful control the lives of the powerless’. The father, who hates the concept of ‘organized’ religion, encourages his kids to engage in a planned act of shoplifting. The Cash-family celebrates ‘Noam Chomsky Day’ instead of ‘Christmas’

Mortensen’s performance will help audiences look through a strong mash-up of what we have become lately, doubtful, cynical, yet somehow considerate. To feel the fear, yet not lose sight of the greater good – is the lesson to learn.

Consider, say a - Jim Carrey or Willem Dafoe in place of Mortensen, Ben’s character would have come off as an easy progressive. But here we have Mortensen who’s put out two very different kinds of make-believe personalities, one that is paradoxically hard-core ‘soft’, religious and band-wagon following, other who’s rugged and outlaw-ish on the outside, so that he can liberate himself from the norm. Brace yourself because his outbursts are all bizarre to the eye at first, but what we are living through isn’t a cakewalk either.

Voluntary isolation from the many curiosities of a capitalist state while fearing that you might catch a cold, isn’t that the dream? Ben should help those who still haven’t yet made themselves comfortable with the idea of a quarantine.

Why?

Because Ben had the courage to isolate himself as a way of life. We have all been wanting to do this but have never given much thought to it because we hardly think these days. Ben and his family learnt how to put thought and reason to the basics - reading, writing, eating, and – the most haunting one of them all – silence.

These are sensitive times and it is performances and art like this that will help us keep our head and heart in their respective places. What if – one of these days, this lockdown becomes the dystopian truth of our lives? We’ll need a roadmap to guide us and no better way left but to allow performing arts and film to do that.

When this is over – hopefully, we come out stronger than we were because we haven’t smoked any of those cigarettes, haven’t eaten those red-hot vada-pavs. This is a simple film-recommendation from one friend to another, one that can help us make peace with not just now and but hereon.
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