With almost any other actor in the role (like, say, Willem Dafoe), Ben would probably have come off as a starry-eyed woodland progressive.

Left-wing and right-wing: It’s all about Viggo. When he’s told about Noam Chomsky Day, the best line in the film is Langella’s dryly bewildered response: “I don’t even know who that is.” Here, he’s the reactionary traditionalist who is also speaking common sense: that a man living alone in the woods with his five children is dangerous and maybe even crazy. In a lesser movie, Jack would have been the bad guy.

Right-wing: The father, Jack, is played by Frank Langella, an actor of such towering humanity that he couldn’t play a caricatured right-wing lout if he tried. Left-wing: At the funeral, Ben and his kids burst into the church looking like refugees from a homeless road-company production of “Godspell.” Ben then stands in front of the casket and reads his wife’s will, which decrees that she wants to be cremated - a speech that makes her straitlaced, overly controlling father, sitting there in his pew, glower with conservative outrage. Right-wing: Rellian, who despises Noam Chomsky Day, openly wishes that the family could celebrate Christmas, thus putting him in league with all those talking heads on Fox News who angrily stand up for the right of sales clerks to say “Merry Christmas.” It’s called Noam Chomsky Day, in honor of the patron saint of muckraking leftist-analytical insight. Left-wing: Ben hates organized religion, and he has come up with a holiday that the Cash family celebrates in place of Christmas. The other implication is that he’s inviting them to act like reckless junior-league sociopaths. Right-wing: At a supermarket, Ben leads his kids in a cleverly orchestrated act of shoplifting. The film’s implication is that they’re anarchic “freegans” who aren’t even stealing, they’re just taking what The Man already took from them. Left-wing: At a supermarket, Ben leads his kids in a cleverly orchestrated act of shoplifting. Right-wing: Ben’s philosophy is summed up by the credo “The powerful control the lives of the powerless.” Very Donald Trump. Left-wing: Ben’s philosophy is summed up by the credo “The powerful control the lives of the powerless.” Very Bernie Sanders. When he flips the switch, you’re certain that it’s going to be some classic nugget of rock & roll freedom, but instead it’s a Scottish bagpipe call to arms, less “Born to Be Wild” than “Braveheart.” Right-wing: To launch their journey, Ben blasts music from a speaker mounted on the bus. Left-wing: To attend the funeral, Ben and his family travel to San Diego in a souped-up school bus befitting the Merry Pranksters or maybe the Partridge Family. It was Ben’s hippie purity that probably killed her, whereas an openness to the remedies offered by Big Pharma could possibly have saved her life. Early on, we learn that Ben’s wife, after deteriorating and being placed in a hospital, committed suicide. Right-wing: The 1970s nature cure didn’t take. Laing, the ’70s countercultural psychiatrist who theorized that mental illness - in particular, schizophrenia - was the product of a repressive society. The film pings off the philosophies of R.D. The two thought that being out in nature, away from the evils of society, would cure her mental imbalance. Left-wing: The reason that Ben first moved his family into the woods is that his wife suffered from bipolar affective disorder. Right-wing: They’re such extraordinary students because Ben is a rigorously demanding teacher, a stern advocate of traditional study who questions them like the headmaster of a Jesuit academy. They’re the liberal-arts equivalent of the Von Trapp Family Singers. Left-wing: Ben’s children, who are home-schooled, have read - and, apparently, understood - every nuance of every book from “The Brothers Karamazov” to “Middlemarch” to “Lolita,” making them walking repositories of humane enlightenment. Right-wing: Ben’s 12-year-old son, Rellian (played by the scene-stealing Nicholas Hamilton), is moved to rebel against his father because he truly resents being named “Rellian.” And with good reason: No child on the planet should be named Rellian. That’s so each of them will have a name shared by no one else in the world - a celebration of their individuality that makes each of them sound like a character from a medieval videogame.

Left-wing: Outdoing the celebrity fetish for naming kids things like Blue Ivy and Apple, Ben and his wife have given their children made-up names like Vespyr, Zaja, and Rellian. Left-wing: The Cash family eat everything that they kill, thus preserving the cycle of ecological harmony.

Captain fantastic