History Film / CaptainFantastic

* PoliticallyIncorrectHero: Ben. He's anti-capitalist/anti-consumerist to the point he fakes a heart attack so the kids can steal food, despite scenes before and after establishing he has no money worries. Vespyr indicates that while he's raised the family to not make fun of anyone, Christians are the only [[AcceptableReligiousTargets fair game]]. He offers a book named "The Joy of Sex" to Nai (a six-year old) after he earlier queried him about it - and since he's not interested, he gives him a Ka-Bar knife to play with instead. Later, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, he's shown not only reading ''ComicBook/{{Maus}}'' to Nai at his sister's house, but explaining to him what [[UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust the showers]] actually did.

* BreakTheHaughty: Ben near the end of the film. [[spoiler: He loses his wife, gets kicked out of her funeral, has his sons start to openly question him and almost gets Vespyr killed during an attempt to "save" Rellian from his grandparents' house (where he's staying voluntarily). This makes him decide to leave the kids with Jack and Abigail.]] Unusually though, he doesn't come out the worse for it, as [[spoiler:the kids decide to stay with him and cremate their mother the way he always wanted]].

* TragicHero: Ben. Highly intelligent, charismatic and extremely physically fit, he's raising his kids to be "philosopher kings" with all his attributes. However, his FatalFlaw is his distrust of the standard urban society he left behind and his intolerance of that lifestyle. While the film shows there's much truth to his beliefs, it also leads to Leslie dying from suicide when her bipolar disorder didn't get better living in the wild as he thought, leaving it too late to get her proper treatment. Later, it [[spoiler:leads to his nearly losing his kids when his total inflexibility leads to first clashing with Rellian and Bo as they want to explore the outside world, then nearly getting Vespyr killed in a supremely ill-judged attempt to "save" Rellian from his grandparents]].

* BothSidesHaveAPoint: A movie-wide case. While many of Ben's points about the commercialized urban society, its failings and the advantages of raising his children in the way he does are shown to be accurate, many of the points Jack and his sister, Jack and Abigail, and even Ben's own sons Bo and Rellian make about the kids' social development and the dangers of their lifestyle are shown to be equally valid. Fittingly, the movie ends with Ben implicitly striking a compromise by ultimately allowing Bo to travel out into the world to find his own path in life and also allowing the rest of the kids to enroll in school and get a conventional education as well as have the ability to leave him and integrate and interact with conventional modern society when they're older if that's what they so choose...while still in the meantime having himself and the kids live on a farm that's relatively isolated from the rest of society so that he doesn't have to completely abandon his comfort zone.

* BothSidesHaveAPoint: A movie-wide case. While many of Ben's points about the commercialized urban society, its failings and the advantages of raising his children in the way he does are shown to be accurate, many of the points Jack and his sister make about the kids' social development and the dangers of their lifestyle are shown to be equally valid.

* AdultFear:
** From Jack and Abigail's point of view it's easy to understand why Jack has so many concerns.
*** Firstly their daughter develops a serious mental illness, and her husband's response (as he himself admits later) is to simply hope she'll get better - and when she doesn't, it's too late to do anything meaningful before she dies.
*** Then their grandson shows up not long after her funeral, covered in cuts and bruises and with an untreated broken hand, raising the spectre of their grandchildren being physically abused. On top of which they discover that the kids aren't in school as they thought. And on top of ''that'' [[spoiler:their granddaughter is almost killed trying to "rescue" her brother from a situation he's in willingly - on her father's orders, no less]].
** From Ben's perspective, the hospital scene where the doctor explains how close Vespyr came to being paralyzed or killed, knowing he was the one who put her in that position.