Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Taika Waititi is one of the most distinctive writer-directors making films today. Horror mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows was one of my favorite films last year, and he’s slated to direct the next installment in the Thor franchise, a spectrum too broad for most filmmakers to grasp successfully. There were some understandably raised eyebrows when a director primarily known for quirky, low-budget comedies was tapped to helm a multimillion dollar superhero epic, but Hunt for the Wilderpeople should go a long way toward allaying those concerns. If nothing else, this film has firmly established Waititi’s reputation as one of the best around.

Closer in tone and subject to the director’s 2010 film Boy than last year’s Shadows, Wilderpeople could easily have dashed itself on the rocks of tired cliche. After all, how many times can you watch the story of a rebellious and angst-riddled teen learning the value of family from a gruff father figure before it becomes unduly repetitive? But this is Waititi we’re talking about, so rest assured that you’ve never seen the story told in quite this way. Wilderpeople has more heart than any movie I’ve come across in recent memory and manages to be emotionally effective without succumbing to saccharine sentimentality.

Waititi’s greatest gift as a writer is his ability to generate pathos while maintaining an incisive sense of humor that is just strange and engaging enough to keep things from getting maudlin. His characters are perennial outsiders who manage to build surrogate families in spite of themselves, but there’s nothing particularly unique in that thematic thread. What makes Waititi’s work so special is that he treats these characters with a genuine warmth, often sweet but never cloyingly so. Wilderpeople focuses on Ricky Baker, an overweight teen hiding behind the affectations of hip-hop culture. A character who should be annoyingly unexceptional becomes something far more through Waititi’s gentle humor: a moving and relatable protagonist. Jokes about Ricky’s weight, urban sensibilities or utter lack of survival skills are never anything less than good-natured, and, as with most of Waititi’s characters, he’s written with a sense of inherent self-worth that allows jokes made at his expense to contribute to character development rather than undermining it. This is a delicate balancing act that lesser writers often fail to achieve, and Waititi makes it look effortless.

The success or failure of an initiation story along the lines of Wilderpeople is entirely contingent on the chemistry of its leads, and Waititi’s cast does not disappoint. No stranger to portraying imposing and domineering figures, Sam Neill plays Ricky’s adoptive uncle with a sense of depth and nuance that firmly grounds the film’s more absurdist elements, and I can safely say that I have not enjoyed Neill this much since Event Horizon nearly two decades ago. But it’s Julian Dennison’s turn as Ricky that truly impresses, imbuing the role with a sense of charm and confidence that makes it impossible not to love him. Working with children has flummoxed many great directors (Dakota Fanning in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds comes to mind), but Waititi has found in Dennison that rarest of gems: a child actor as talented as he is endearing. Solid supporting turns from Rima Te Wiata as Ricky’s doting Auntie Bella, Rhys Darby as an unhinged hermit and Rachel House as the world’s most psychotically overzealous social worker contribute a complexity and texture to the story world, as does the beautifully shot New Zealand bush country.

It’s difficult to overstate how enjoyable Wilderpeople actually is, bolstered in its moments of tragedy by stellar performances and a singularly offbeat sense of humor. Waititi’s characters never feel sorry for themselves, even when they could justifiably do so, and it’s this unflappable determination that drives the narrative and makes the film so resoundingly successful. While studios such as Disney-Pixar seem to be on a constant quest to produce the fabled four-quadrant movie that will appeal to kids and adults equally, Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a film that actually attains that goal. I might have to borrow my brother’s teenage kids so I have an excuse to see it again, but then, for a film this good, no excuse is required. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and some language.

Now playing at Fine Arts Theatre