Matt Ross is probably best known for his role in the HBO comedy series "Silicon Valley," where he plays the arrogant CEO Gavin Belson of Google-like IT giant Hooli. Belson is a man wired deep into the matrix, for whom nothing matters more than massive functionality in lossless cloud-based compression, and keeping the shareholders happy.
Ross takes a 180-degree turn as the director and writer of "Captain Fantastic," a delightful, sharply written comedy about a man who has taken his family deep into the woods of the Pacific Northwest to live completely off the grid. The film won top prize in the Un Certain Regard category at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and its combination of quirky humor with some deeper thoughts about the nature of parenting allows viewers to enjoy this on whatever level they please.
Ben Cash (played by Viggo Mortensen) is raising six kids (George MacKay and Samantha Isler play the elders) in a cabin with no internet, telephone, television or just about any contact with society at large. In America, this sort of person is often a gun-loving survivalist type, but in Ben's case, he's Tarzan with a college degree, a back-to-the-land paleo-hippie. He teaches his kids how to be self-sufficient through bow-and-arrow hunting, scavenging, gardening and other practical skills. Entertainment is a campfire hootenanny. Plenty of books too, and his kids are all autodidacts who know the difference between a Trotskyite and a Maoist.