Butler's Cinema Scene

Julian Dennison

“THE HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE”  My rating: B-

101 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Kiwi filmmaker Taika Waititi had a classic cult hit with 2014’s “Things We Do in the Shadows,” a hilarious faux documentary about a pack of inept bickering vampires living in a rickety urban home. With its talking-head technique and absurdist attitude it was a close cousin to the comedies of Christopher Guest (“Best in Show,” “Waiting for Huffman”).

For his followup, “The Hunter for the Wilderpeople,” Waititi is channelling Wes Anderson, especially Anderson’s sublime “Moonrise Kingdom.”  If you’re going to pattern yourself on a recent film, that’s a pretty good one to emulate.

Ricky (Julian Dennison) is a rotund, sullen 13-year-old juvenile delinquent. He’s been a ward of the state most of his life and now he’s out of options. Having run away from countless foster homes, he’ll be on his way to a prison if his latest placement doesn’t work out.

As the film begins he’s being deposited on the farm of Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and Hector (Sam Neill), a married couple living in glorious isolation deep in a fantastic landscape of jagged mountains, jungle and winding streams. Paula (Rachel House), the brusque social services lady who delivers him, doubts that Ricky can be turned around…but at least this far from civilization there’s a limit to how much harm he can do or how far he can go.

Bella, a talkative woman desperate for motherhood (and quite capable of killing a wild boar with a knife), does her best to make a home for this resentful wild child. Her husband Hector, a bearded survivalist type, is unimpressed by this surly interloper with a gangsta/rapper wardrobe.

Wapiti’s screenplay s boils down to an extensive chase. After an initial adjustment period, Ricky softens and starts to get comfortable with life in the sticks. Hector  still isn’t crazy about this wise-ass city kid, but they become partners in crime and soon are hiding in the woods and living off the land while an ever-growing army of cops, park rangers, bounty hunters and others try to bring them in.

Like an Anderson movie, “Wilderpeople” features titled chapters (“A Real Bad Egg,” “Another Door,” “Broken Foot Camp”) and daring tonal shifts, going from physical comedy to heartstring-tugging emotion, social satire to a celebration of innocence to a tactile emersion in a gorgeous natural world.

Julian Dennison, Sam Neill…on the run

Unlike Anderson, though, Waititi hasn’t developed the knack for keeping these disparate elements in balance. The film’s moods change so abruptly (and often gracelessly) that viewers develop an emotional form of whiplash.

The villains of the piece — House’s welfare lady who becomes a sort of Nazi commander when placed in charge of the search, and a gaggle of good ol’ boys with their eyes on the reward money — are overplayed to the point of embarrassment. Same goes for Rhys Darby, who portrays a forest-dwelling paranoiac named Psycho Sam.

And despite having produced a beautiful-looking film, Waititi has made some wince-worthy musical choices.

But there are some moments of sublime beauty. The early relationship between Bella and Ricky is breathtakingly sweet, and the young fugitive spends a night on the farm of an adolescent girl (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) and her stoner father that provides a deeply satisfying moment of reverie.

And at the film’s heart you’ve got young Dennison, who is good, and Sam Neill, who is freakin’ great.

Neill delivers the whole package, giving us a character who is outwardly interesting but who gets only more compelling the more you learn about him. Unlike other elements of “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” he never succumbs to parody or cheap comedy…there’s real soul in his performance.

| Robert W. Butler