Through confrontations with his father-in-law, Jack Bertang (Frank Langella) and his own children, Ben’s worldview begins to shift to see that civilization isn’t the evil beast he once thought it out to be.
By the time everything is wrapped up, Ben is a new man.
Throughout Captain Fantastic, which netted Mortensen a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor (his second), Ben Cash gives the other characters (and the movie’s audience) more than enough opportunities to both love and loathe his unconventional and anarchistic ways of bringing up a family.