A- | A foster kid and his adoptive father hide in the New Zealand forest from child services. Directed by Taika Waititi Starring Julian Dennison, Sam Neill, and Rachel House Review by Jon Kissel |
The family-friendly adventure gets a modern update with Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Waititi’s fourth film and easily his best gives him a larger budget, but large within the context of New Zealand independent cinema. For a mere $7.5 million, Waititi creates a kinder Goonies and a funnier Stand By Me, the equivalent of an 80's Amblin film in a setting outside of American suburbia. By this point in his career, Waititi has honed his golden Simpsons ratio of 90% comedy and 10% pathos and is about to cash a big check from Marvel, all while demonstrating a creative strength behind the camera that makes his film look more expensive than it is. His transition away from New Zealand micro-budgets and into major commercial and critical cinema has yielded mixed results. The fulcrum of Hunt For the Wilderpeople is the height of one phase of his filmmaking career that later phases are measured against, and come up short.
Taking place in a lush New Zealand that most people would recognize from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is, of course, name-dropped, Waititi tells the story of Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison), a wayward orphan who's one failed foster home away from juvenile hall. The heavy-handed state, represented by the power-mad child services bureaucrat Paula (Rachel House), drops Ricky off at the rural home of Hec (Sam Neill) and Bella (Rima Te Wiata). Hec is gruff and disinterested, though Bella is blunt but loving, teasing Ricky about his weight while also composing birthday songs for him. All are outcasts in their own way, as Bella is also an orphan and former ward of the state while Hec is an illiterate ex-convict. Bella’s empathy for Ricky’s background and the complete isolation of their cottage means that she doesn’t react when he keeps running away in the night, until he eventually becomes satisfied that he’s not going to be sent back.
What might’ve been a happy family is shattered when Bella suddenly dies of natural causes. Hec doesn’t believe himself to be cut out for state-approved parentage and accepts that Ricky’s going to be reassigned, but Ricky knows that there are no more foster homes for a 13-year-old. One last runaway attempt leads to him burning down a shed with a poorly made body double inside. Hec finds Ricky in the forest, but breaks his ankle, forcing the two of them to camp for weeks while his bones heal. Meanwhile, Paula has taken the worst possible interpretation of events back at the farm, and sends all available resources into the forest to find Ricky and Hec and fold them back under her oppressive control. They thwart her for months, hiding out in the forest while their legend builds with increasingly sympathetic news reports.
Waititi fills Ricky's trek with a wacky cast of characters befitting his earlier work in vampire mockumentaries and Flight of the Conchords. Ricky, Hec, Bella, and Paula all move beyond the types they might have been, mostly through Waititi's ability to give them all their own distinct kind of laughs. Paula's overestimation of her mission, Ricky's well-meaning obliviousness, Hec's curt delivery, and Bella's no-filter boisterousness all generate comedy from absurdity and pathos. As the wilderness trek continues, there's no shortage of oddballs, from an inappropriate priest played by Waititi himself to New Zealand staple Rhys Darby as a tweaked mountain man. A brief rest with another rural family provides a peak at what Ricky’s life could be like, and Waititi characterizes this father and daughter as another pair who can generate comedy from their specificity and warmth from their gentleness. Hunt For the Wilderpeople creates these idylls for Ricky and, for all the fun it has, keeps asking why he can’t have this simple and happy life. That emotional resonance bumps Waititi’s film well outside his long-running resistance to earnestness. Not everything has to be a joke. Just most things. B+
What might’ve been a happy family is shattered when Bella suddenly dies of natural causes. Hec doesn’t believe himself to be cut out for state-approved parentage and accepts that Ricky’s going to be reassigned, but Ricky knows that there are no more foster homes for a 13-year-old. One last runaway attempt leads to him burning down a shed with a poorly made body double inside. Hec finds Ricky in the forest, but breaks his ankle, forcing the two of them to camp for weeks while his bones heal. Meanwhile, Paula has taken the worst possible interpretation of events back at the farm, and sends all available resources into the forest to find Ricky and Hec and fold them back under her oppressive control. They thwart her for months, hiding out in the forest while their legend builds with increasingly sympathetic news reports.
Waititi fills Ricky's trek with a wacky cast of characters befitting his earlier work in vampire mockumentaries and Flight of the Conchords. Ricky, Hec, Bella, and Paula all move beyond the types they might have been, mostly through Waititi's ability to give them all their own distinct kind of laughs. Paula's overestimation of her mission, Ricky's well-meaning obliviousness, Hec's curt delivery, and Bella's no-filter boisterousness all generate comedy from absurdity and pathos. As the wilderness trek continues, there's no shortage of oddballs, from an inappropriate priest played by Waititi himself to New Zealand staple Rhys Darby as a tweaked mountain man. A brief rest with another rural family provides a peak at what Ricky’s life could be like, and Waititi characterizes this father and daughter as another pair who can generate comedy from their specificity and warmth from their gentleness. Hunt For the Wilderpeople creates these idylls for Ricky and, for all the fun it has, keeps asking why he can’t have this simple and happy life. That emotional resonance bumps Waititi’s film well outside his long-running resistance to earnestness. Not everything has to be a joke. Just most things. B+
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