Review: In ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople,’ Lighting Out for the Bush
Julian Dennison, left, and Sam Neill in Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople.†Credit The Orchard
“Hunt for the Wilderpeople†takes a troika of familiar story types — the plucky kid, the crusty geezer, the nurturing bosom — and strips them of cliché. Charming and funny, it is a drama masquerading as a comedy about an unloved boy whom nobody wants until someone says, Yes, I’ll love him. Much of the humor comes from the child, who’s at once a pip and a gloriously expressive ambassador for the director Taika Waititi ’s cleareyed take on human nature and movies. Mr. Waititi knows that we love to cry at sad and bad times, but he also knows that people in pain need to get on with their lives.
The story centers on the soon-to-be 13-year-old Ricky (the irresistible Julian Dennison), a New Zealand foster child who, as the movie opens, is being placed with an older couple who live in a pastoral clearing at the edge of the bush. Ricky rapidly bonds with the woman, who goes by Aunty Bella (Rima Te Wiata as the nurturer), but he’s kept at arm’s length by her gruff, taciturn husband, Uncle Hec (Sam Neill, perfect as the house geezer). Like hippies time forgot, Bella and Hec live off the land and its bounty, including boar and the possums that she skins one handful of fur at a time.
Anatomy | ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’
Taika Waititi narrates a scene from his film with Sam Neill and Julian Dennison opening June 24.
By MEKADO MURPHY on Publish Date June 16, 2016. Photo by The Orchard. Watch in Times Video »
Mr. Waititi works fast, setting a bright, light comic mood that owes something to Wes Anderson but is organically his own. Mr. Waititi started out in comedy, shifting to movie directing more than a decade ago with little evident strain. His first features (“Boy,†“Eagle vs. Shark†) are imperfect, but also unmistakably of an auteurist piece with strongly defined characters, a deep sense of place and a humorously deadpan view of life’s absurdities. They’re also very sweet. More recently, he and his longtime friend, the comic Jemaine Clement, another New Zealander, directed “What We Do in the Shadows,†a cheerfully silly mockumentary about vampires living as roommates.
The comedy in “Wilderpeople†is quieter than in Mr. Waititi’s earlier movies, which strengthens the story’s realism. Ricky is a funny kid. He’s amusing to look at, for one thing, what with his fish-out-of-water hip-hop threads, and has a gift for bolts from the blue, like the bad-boy haikus he creates (and recites) as part of his therapeutic training. As a child of social services, he throws words like “processing†around, though Mr. Waititi is careful when it comes to Ricky’s history, which is scattered piecemeal throughout. Tragedy touches the characters in “Wilderpeople,†but it doesn’t define them and they’re not into sharing, caring and closure like their American counterparts.
Sorrow descends on “Wilderpeople†soon after it opens, leaving Uncle Hec and Ricky first unmoored and then on the run in the bush, where they’re chased by a social services zealot, Paula (Rachel House), and her minion, Andy (Oscar Kightley). Mr. Waititi likes to play with types of comedy, but he’s partial to modest exaggeration, whether he’s putting the joke across with slapstick, songs, caricature, lovingly deployed insults or a flurry of tableaulike images. All the characters are funny and idiosyncratic, but because they make you laugh in different ways they also register — with the pointed exception of the cartoonish Paula and Andy — as real people rather than as contrivances.
Trailer: 'Hunt For The Wilderpeople'
Raised on hip-hop and foster care, defiant city kid Ricky gets a fresh start in the New Zealand countryside. He quickly finds himself at home with his new foster family: the loving Aunt Bella, the cantankerous Uncle Hec, and dog Tupac. When a traged
By THE ORCHARD on Publish Date May 7, 2016. Image courtesy of Internet Video Archive. Watch in Times Video »
Drawn in crayon by Mr. Waititi, Paula and Andy are burlesques of bureaucratic incompetency. There’s an obvious political dimension to Paula’s fanatical, overblown crusade to flush Ricky and Uncle Hec out of the bush, but her mania is mostly just another clown car that Mr. Waititi enjoys taking out for a spin. For the most part, Mr. Waititi’s politics are as matter of fact as his humor and expressed through his gritty, singular characters, some of whom happen to be white, others of whom happen to be Maori. (Mr. Waititi also wrote the movie, adapting it from the book “Wild Pork and Watercress†by Barry Crump. a best-selling author and self-styled bushman .)
Mr. Waititi’s expansive sense of human beings in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople†allows his characters to endure loss and hardship without forcing them to be wholly limited by their suffering, as marginalized people too often are in fiction. They’re romantic and pragmatic, eccentric and utterly ordinary. They’re also reasonably flawed, as is this movie, but Mr. Waititi transcends most of the narrative bumps and generally dodges the obvious land mines, including cuteness. He’s still finding his way, but he’s already a director who — as he does in a shot of a friendly, undefeated child pausing to wave at a pursuer — can distill a worldview into a single, perfect cinematic moment.
“Hunt for the Wilderpeople†is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned). This is a boy’s adventure story with many of the familiar genre trappings, including guns, knives, dangerous animals and equally threatening people.Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
NYT Critic’s Pick
Director Taika Waititi
Writer Taika Waititi
Stars Sam Neill. Julian Dennison. Rima Te Wiata. Rachel House
Running Time 1h 41m
Genres Adventure. Comedy. Drama
Movie data powered by IMDb.com
Last updated: Jul 23, 2016
A version of this review appears in print on June 24, 2016, on Page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: Lighting Out for the Bush. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe
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