Hunt for the Wilderpeople: Directed by Taika Waititi, Starring: Julian Dennison and Sam Neil7/26/2016 Hunt for the Wilderpeople might be a perfect argument for why the world should be run under the mentality of a 13-year-old kid. The elementary school world has faded away ever so slightly and now the depth of the adult world has started to slowly reveal itself, but still, the mindset is: authority is bad, the forest is a place to have an almost mystical adventure and the most important person in the world is you. Ricky Baker is a boy sent to live with a foster mother and father out near the New Zealand “Bushland,” a huge forested area. Soon, Baker and the foster father Uncle Heck end up alone in the woods and running from child protective services. The perfection of the film comes not from that plot, which is simple, and probably a little off kilter in structure, but again from that worldview of a 13-year-old. Wilderpeople understands the fact that a child at this point in their life is still a child, but is slowly attempting to figure out what is going on in the world. Ricky learning how to survive in the wild, while also staying true to his childish and destructive nature perfectly encapsulates this. Young actor, Julian Dennison plays Ricky with a sense of naïveté that completely sells the whole dramatic arc of the movie. Dennison is also just a different type of protagonist than we usually see, and he harnesses his figure (yes, he’s chubby) to create jokes that would not work with any other type of kid. Sam Neil’s performance as Heck is ecstatically funny because it turns out Heck is in the same situation that Ricky is in. As Heck’s character develops it’s revealed that he has a rough past that only one person helped him through and he is wonderfully complex on account of that. The juvenile comedic edge of the worldview benefits everything else in the film too. The Child Protective Services officer is a delight to watch as actress Rachel House repeats “No child left behind” in such a manic and bloodthirsty way that you almost get the sense that if the officer ever caught Ricky she’d stab him. There're difficult balances to strike in the movie everywhere like that. That character had to be built specifically to seem reasonable yet murderously enthusiastic and I can’t imagine it was an easy character to write or create. However, in the mind space that the movie creates she works and is utterly daunting in her effectiveness. As characters everyone’s idiosyncratic, and the balance necessary to pull that off while keeping the structure just loose enough to make sure these idiosyncrasies don’t smash into each other is mind-boggling. Not to say all of it works out, but Taika Waititi’s writing and directing work is top notch in a way that allows for complete tonal consistency. That structure though does end of feeling a slight bit bulbous though as the film at 101 minutes feels stretched out. There’s so many weird things trying to fit into this movie that eventually the film seems a little overdone and at times it feels like it’s going a bit slow, but what’s there is still genius so that matters very little. The fact is it’s just not easy to say anything bad about Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It’s too charming, too funny, and above all too intelligent for that. Waititi has crafted a perfect film out of pieces that should not fit together, but they do. Onward to Thor Ragnarok. Hunt for the Wilderpeople gets a 10 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |