Viggo Mortensen’s ‘Captain Fantastic’ takes you off the grid

The movie “Captain Fantastic” won this year’s Golden Space Needle Award for Best Movie at the Seattle International Film Festival.

It’s about a dad and mom who take their five kids completely off the grid, creating a kind of back-to-nature existence deep in the woods of Washington state.

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Instead of living on their laptops and iPhones, these kids learn to hunt wild animals with a bow and arrow, grow their own food, practice martial arts, and read far above their grade level.

Rather than listening to pop music, they play their own makeshift instruments and celebrate Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas. They grow up despising “the Man” and the capitalist system that’s polluting the earth.

Perfectly cast as the dad in this kind of hippie paradise is Viggo Mortensen who – at least by Hollywood standards – often likes to go off the grid himself.

One of the most reluctant of celebrities, Mortensen nonetheless came to Seattle to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Seattle International Film Festival and to promote “Captain Fantastic,” a movie he tells me he’s particularly proud of.

For starters, he says he had a blast roughing it in the woods.

“I loved it and fortunately the kids did, too. If they would have been a bunch of whiners, it would have been difficult but they went for it. We got together a couple of weeks before. The kids could light a fire without matches and sleep alone out in the woods alone at night, they could track animals, they could skin a deer. They knew about plants and lot of things. They played a lot of music together. They were like little, very intelligent wild animals by the end of the training period, so we were on board. I’ve always liked being in the outdoors. I used to live in northern Idaho in a house in the middle of the forest and I was happy with that.”

But as much as he identifies with his character in “Captain Fantastic,” he’s at pains to say he’s not him.

“It’s not to say the character is exactly like me. He’s a little extreme. One description that I heard of him that I like is that he’s likable and obviously loves his kids, but he seems to be a bit insane. I think that’s probably about as good of a description as you’re going to get. He’s extreme. He takes conscious parenting to an extreme.”

That’s what Mortensen appreciates most about “Captain Fantastic” — it’s not black and white.

“One of the things that I really like about the story is that at first you look at it and you say OK, I see what this is. These are crazy people that live off the grid in the middle of nowhere and yes, they’re smart and so forth, but they’re kind of crazy and very liberal. They’re going to be the heroes. We’re going to follow them against all these conservative foes throughout the story and we’ll be on their side, or not depending on your point of view. But it isn’t that at all. It becomes something completely different. It doesn’t condone or condemn the extreme nature of the way they live or the other people they come up against. It’s about communication and to some degree, I think the movie talks about something that’s really happening in our country. There’s a growing realization that we’re on the wrong track in terms of social interaction and cohesiveness. I think this year’s political campaign is just a surface manifestation of the real problem we have communicating with people. The movie deals with that and I really like that.

“Captain Fantastic” opens Friday.