Viggo Mortensen plays Ben, the father of six children, who is a rugged outdoorsman and anti-system, super smart individualist who home-schools his children with his wife in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. His wife's father, played by Frank Langella, is wealthy and disagrees with Ben's raising of the children and actually tries to take the children from him when Ben's wife dies, at a very young age, from a disease. The family is not vegetarian, and they do kill their own meat to survive and develop other outdoor skills. The children are raised without modern medicines and vaccines, and all are healthy and bright.
The relationship between the children and Ben is wonderful, and there are many endearing scenes. There is a scene where his six-year-old daughter knows more about the Bill of Rights than her two high-school-age cousins from the city. There is one scene where the youngest boy is somewhat seduced by a young woman he meets, when the family has to go into the city to go to the mother's funeral. But it is not a naked scene, however there is kissing and panting. In another scene Ben is completely naked and it shows his you-know-what very clearly, but it kind of fits as him being a-part-of-nature kind of guy. And like he said in the movie, "It's just a penis. Didn't you ever see a penis?" This probably explains why the movie is rated R. But besides this, I would recommend it for the whole family. Because of these scenes, I would rate it PG-15. We need more films like this one.
~Van of Urantia*MPAA = Motion Picture Association of America
*4DFR = An alternative, 4th-Dimensional, rating is supplied by the author of this review
