Review of Captain Fantastic (2016) by Mmadnessgames — 17 Dec 2018

I was really enjoying this film until the end.

At one point, one of the daughters had to describe Lolita to her father in her own words... She said the book makes you empathise with the protagonist, despite him being basically a child abuser.

Obviously they were making a comparison between the protagonists of Captain Fantastic and Lolita.

But how does Lolita end?

Is there a happy ending?

I'm tired of manipulative Hollywood crap.

Where is the turn around moment for this awful father? I'm not convinced, by the end of the film, that he should have any contact with his children.

His son - who was accepted at Harvard, and all the other ivy league schools - ends up going to Africa... and the rest of his children go to school.

The assumption is that he's not going to endanger their lives anymore. But, what if one of them had died in his care? Would it be a happy ending then?

Digging up a corpse with a team of small children and then burning it ritualistically is the last decision we see him make as a parent. Other than the off-screen decision to put them in school.

But, what about all the harm that's already been done?

If this was Lolita, the book would end with Dolly and Humbert in a country house somewhere rather than ending with tragedy... along with some vague indication that he is remorseful. Would that be enough?

They said to Captain Fantastic that his daughter would have died or been paralysed if she had been hit a millimetre lower down on her head.

So the point here is that - what? - when tragedy is avoided by sheer chance, nobody is accountable for anything?

Most of the film is child abuse / awful parenting. Then, off-screen, the father decides not to abuse his children anymore (after he almost kills one of them, again) and the credits role.

The writer/director has no real connection to this story. It's political, not personal. This is why it's SO exaggerated. All the children are geniuses in every field imaginable. They have the bodies of "elite athletes"... Whereas the general population are all a bunch of fat idiots.

The scene were they were all climbing a cliff face was particularly ridiculous.

If this was Lolita, one of the kids would have died... It's not Lolita, it's mindless Hollywood crap trying to pass itself off as literature.

When the Captain was driving away in an empty bus, having left his children with their grandparents, that was a better place for an ending... It wasn't a perfect ending (still weak in comparison to Lolita), but it was certainly a hell of a lot better than the actual ending.