Captain Fantastic: Synopsis

In the exam you will NOT need to regurgitate the story - the following synopsis is just to familiarise yourself with the order of events that take place in the film and to help you choose relevant scenes to illuminate your discussion of film form, representation and aesthetics (meaning and response), spectatorship and ideology.

SYNOPSIS

The Cash family - father Ben and six children - live an idealised alternative lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest Forest, killing game for food, training to live off the land and home-schooling in everything from literature to quantum physics.

When the mother, Leslie, hospitalised for depression far away, commits suicide, Ben decides, against the bitter wishes of his wealthy father-in-law, to drive the family south to attend her funeral.

Along the way they con a state trooper who pulls the bus they are travelling over, shoplift food after Ben pretends to have heart attack in the store and visit some very conventional in-laws.

After Ben delivers an offensive eulogy, they are thrown out of the funeral service. The grandfather, Jack, connives to keep the children with him; following a near fatal accident involving Ben's daughter Vespyr, Ben ruefully agrees to this.

As he leaves, however, he finds that the children have sneaked on to their bus with him. Together they exhume the mother's body and burn it on a pyre in accordance with the wishes in her will.