Lost Forever: Everett Ruess

In 1934, 21-year-old Everett Ruess disappeared in the Utah wilds he had explored and painted for three years. “I have loved the red rocks, the twisted trees…. What magnificent country I've seen, tremendous wastelands, canyons hundreds of feet deep,” he wrote in his journal. Diane Orr's Lost Forever: Everett Ruess explores the mystery of the young artist's death through the eyes of Mark Larson, the actor who not only plays Ruess in dramatized segments, but also conducts a real-life investigation. The result is a fascinating if uneven portrait of a young romantic whose art and writing veered from the sublime to the puerile. Along the way, we meet some grizzled old characters who claim to have known Ruess: some think he was murdered by rustlers; others believe he drowned in the Colorado River, fell off a ledge, or lived with the Navajos. Larson's investigative persona is more convincing than his overacted version of Ruess (which can be cloying), who was a troubled, talented young man, running from a cold, intellectual father, a doting, artistic mother, and the stifling city life of Los Angeles to fall in love with nature at its most sublime and cruel. “When the time comes to die, I will find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is,” Ruess wrote, and this film suggests that he did. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Pendergrast)