With the summer blockbuster season well underway, and the monster that is The Amazing Spider-Man dominating the box office, God help the little guy trying to launch his movie this time of year. With that, let’s have a look at the latest offering from Willem Dafoe; The Hunter; a drama, set entirely on the island of Tasmania (just off the coast of Australia), and a film that’s the most opposite to a blockbuster you could get at the moment.
The Hunter sees a mercenary hunter, Martin David (Dafoe, Daybreakers), hired to find and kill the possibly last of it’s kind Tasmanian Tiger, and extract organic material, for a shady biochemical company. Because he has to travel deep into the untamed Tassy wilderness to search for the Tiger, he has to make fortnightly trips back to civilisation for supplies and rents a room from a missing eco warrior’s wife and children; where the bonds he makes with this family regain some of his humanity, and leads him to question the ethics of what he’s doing with his life.
The ‘back to civilisation’ bits of this movie were awful; it wasn’t the child actors (who were surprisingly good compared to the long, long, history of crap child acting), Finn Woodlock as the mute Bike shows so much more charisma with his facial expressions and reactions than other child actors, and in her debut role Morgana Davis as Sass is both cute and believable, and nor was it the ‘fish out of water’ element of the plot (with the more supposedly metropolitan David not reacting very well to the backwaters of rural bush Australia); it was the lead female character Lucy.
Frances O’Connor’s (A.I.:Artificial Intelligence), performance as Lucy didn’t do anything to make her a believable desirable object for David; she half mumbles her way through the script, and doesn’t put any power behind herself in her delivery or actions. You can’t see how she could change David’s life for the better; the children sure, but if she was part of the deal, then it wouldn’t be one you’d be so keen to take up.
On the other hand, the hunting scenes of this movie are incredible; shot entirely on location in one of Australia’s remote bushes, here’s plenty to marvel at, with the island of Tasmania being as inhospitable in real life as it is captured on film; and whilst it is more common to think of Australia as a desert wasteland, the bush aspect of the country is something not commonly seen on film, but can be just as interesting and beautiful a location to film.
The beauty director Daniel Nettheim captures on film is incredible. He really knows how to shoot a cinematic shot of a valley landscape and give it time to breathe, so the audience can appreciate the shot. It’s great quality capturing like this that makes you appreciate the hunter side of this movie, and having worked his way up from the ranks of Australian TV, it’s a very solid film debut from Nettheim, although as good as the cinematography is, the romance side of David’s story is very uninteresting. O’Connor’s acting doesn’t help but there’s still not much of an attempt to make it interesting; Nettheim just slots in there and we’re all meant to care about it automatically.
Sam Neill’s (Jurassic Park) turn as an old school Australian bush ranger is pleasantly surprising, and while many people expected him to only have a five-minute cameo he actually turns up with a pretty good Australian accent as a grizzled expert of the bush, while Dafoe at least anchors the film into a realm of plausibility, by displaying very realistic survivalist techniques throughout the film, thereby giving a not silly, but definitely unusual, plot grounding. With the rational thought that goes into setting the traps for the tiger, it’s also not surprising to learn that he was taught survival techniques by a bush expert, and being such a veteran we’re also used to seeing Dafoe give it his all in every one of his roles, with The Hunter being no exception.
Having backpacked through Australia, it’s clear that The Hunter’s depiction of remote Australian bars and workers is so accurate, it’s easy to imagine Nettheim just asked a forestry workers group if he could film a couple of scenes on the way up to the out of the way locations next to some logging vehicles; as the forestry workers (who aren’t keen on David’s cover story of researching animals or Lucy’s missing husband) are the main antagonists in the film; and it wouldn’t be surprising to learn they just paid a couple of guys in that bar a few dollars to exchange a few lines with Dafoe.
There are a lot of locations, and similar places to the house David stays, in Australia; where there’s no clean water to wash/drink (leaving you to drink rainwater, and clean with untreated bore water), and power comes from a generator; all adding to the realism of the film, and placing David further from his element, in his personal wilderness of people and having his home comforts of a hot bath and his MP3 Player.
Thematically this film is satiated, you can identify with David’s misery about being a lonely hunter, and his quest to find the last possible Tasmanian Tiger, and when the animal is eventually shown, the emotional response from Dafoe is terrific, and grounds The Hunter for a poignant and moving ending.
A decent, beautiful landscape capturing movie, with an excellent lead character and actor to counteract the dirge of not so great blockbusters being released at the moment. The Hunter does however suffer from a rubbish secondary plot which effects the first, and drags itself down with a terrible lead actress. A Dafoe vehicle of this calibre, with such extreme emotion, deserves a lot more attention that it will get this summer.
Terry Lewis – @thatterrylewis.
