'Captain Fantastic' is a Swiss Family Robinson for today

CANNES, France (AP) — In the film "Captain Fantastic," Viggo Mortensen plays one of the all-time great movie dads.

For audiences at the Cannes Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival (where it first premiered before landing in France), "Captain Fantastic" has resonated as a movie for its time: a heartfelt and comic exploration about whether our hyper-digital, cacophonous lives have strayed from important things.

The film is the second directing feature for Matt Ross, a veteran actor known to many as Gavin Belson on HBO's "Silicon Valley."

In "Captain Fantastic," the idyll of the family's off-the-grid existence is challenged when their mother dies.

A bus trip to her New Mexico parents (long critics of their lifestyle choices) confronts the kids with normal American life and teases out questions about their highly educated but socially removed upbringing.

Ross shot the Pacific Northwest half of the film in Washington, and had his cast come out two weeks early to help build the family's home.

For David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises" (Mortensen's lone Oscar nomination), he briefly lived in Russia and suggested his character's extensive Russian mafia tattoos.

[...] while "Captain Fantastic" is proudly liberal, its conclusion rests on compromise with the father's conservative in-laws.