Butler's Cinema Scene

South African rhino breeder John Hume

“TROPHY” My rating:  B

108 minutes | No MPAA rating

Big game hunting — a incendiary topic known to break up marriages and ruin Thanksgiving dinners — gets remarkably  non-judgmental treatment in “Trophy,”the new documentary by Saul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau.

By turns maddening, melancholy and thoughtful, “Trophy” will defy the expectations of those who instinctively damn big game hunting as a bloodthirsty vestige of our primitive reptilian brains.

But it doesn’t exactly give hunters a clean bill of health, either. In the film’s last scene an American who has spent many thousands of dollars and years of planning to bag an African lion weeps over the body of the animal he has just killed — not out of regret but, presumably, because his dream has been fulfilled and there’s no beast of comparable magnificence on his hit list.

Big game hunting and the worldwide industry that supports it is a monstrously large topic, and  “Trophy” is a sprawling and often unfocused affair. It often seems the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how to tell their story — or exactly what the story is — and ended up throwing lots of stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

This seemingly unstructured approach — no narration, and only a few graphics displaying the current populations and death rates among endangered species — forces audiences to remain alert and to put their prejudices more or less on hold. For whatever you think about the film’s subject, one discovers there’s always more to learn.

(Of course, there are always the tremendous visuals…the film is often as beautiful as one of those National Geographic specials.)

“Trophy” begins with Texas sheep breeder Phillip Glass accompanying his young son on the kid’s first deer kill. Appreciate it or not, this is a rite of passage experienced by hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The film then cuts to South Africa where hunters takes down a rhino with a tranquilizer dart, then saw off the animal’s precious horn. What looks like a barbarous act is anything but. By removing the horn they are ensuring that the rhino — one of a thousand maintained by real estate millioinaire John Hume on his sprawling breeding farm — will be of no value to poachers, who would happily kill the creature in order to sell its “magic” horn on the thriving Asian black market. (Because of its alleged medicinal properties, a rhino horn can go for $250,000.)

“Trophy” takes us to the world’s largest big-game convention in Las Vegas, where American hunters get motivated to tackle the Big Five (that’s when a hunter has bagged an elephant, a lion, a leopard, a rhino and a buffalo).

American hunter Phillip Glass bags his lion

We find ourselves in a South African courtroom where Hume opposes a ban on the legal sale of rhino horn, noting that as a result poachers are working overtime to fulfill the international demand. Moreover, he has a warehouse full of the horns (cut humanely from his own stock) which, if he could sell them, would finance a breeding program that could keep the gray giants going for the foreseeable future.

“Give me [the name of] one animal that went extinct while farmers were breeding it,” Hume tells the camera. “There’s not one.”

This is one of “Trophy’s” main themes: Can we only save certain species by turning them into money-making products? Is it immoral to encourage the sport killing of threatened animals in order to save the species as a whole?

We see wildlife officials who reluctantly must kill lions or elephants that have run afoul of the area’s human inhabitants (one wildlife officer breaks down in tears describing that part of his job).  We join a posse on the prowl for poachers — it’s majorly disturbing to see a white man pushing a black woman into the dirt and demanding information about her no-good husband.

And there is some really disturbing footage of a captive crocodile being lassoed and pulled from his pond so that a beer-drinking American can shoot it.

Finally there is Glass, who maintains that killing these big animals is his God-given right per Genesis: “Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Just because “Trophy” isn’t overtly one-sided doesn’t mean it’s free of politicizing ideas. It should spawn some fiery post-movie discussions…perhaps over a vegetarian dinner.

| Robert W. Butler