The Hunter
Directed by Daniel Nettheim
Written by Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri
Written by Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri
with Willem Dafoe, Frances O'Connor, Sam Neill
2011
Willem Dafoe plays Martin David, a mercenary hunter who we meet just prior to being employed by a biochemical company called Red Leaf. His task is to track down and kill a Tasmanian tiger. Although it has been officially extinct for three quarters of a century, there have been enough suspected sightings to convince Red Leaf to go hunting for the supposed last specimen, in the hope of harvesting valuable genetic material for cloning and chemical engineering. Arriving in the Australian state in the guise of a zoologist, he finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the logging industry and conservationists. Seeing he is an outsider, the loggers immediately give him grief as one of the “greenies”, a belief he is unable to contradict out of convenience. The family he is lodging with, a doped-up mother (Frances O'Connor) and her two young children (Morgana Davies and Finn Woodlock), are healing after the disappearance months before of the conservationist father; a mysterious figure who had one of the claimed tiger sightings to his name. Martin initially keeps his distance, but his own interests move him closer and closer to the family unit and the values of the conservationists, to the point where he begins to question the mission he has been sent on.
Dafoe is an unusual star. The roles he appears in seem to be those of a character actor, but actually, when you look at his work, he doesn’t have that range. It’s only when he’s covered in make-up, as in Shadow of the Vampire, for example, that he really seems to be a different person, otherwise he’s just Willem Dafoe in the same way that Jack Nicholson tends to be Jack Nicholson. What he does have is an incredible believable range within that one persona, imbued with an intelligent ferocity that makes him seem just as at home posing as an academic as grabbing a large Australian manual labourer by the throat and snarling in his face. In The Hunter, he steadily drives the film forward; distant but human, and compelling throughout.
The script is very tight, smartly building a picture of a complex situation and weaving in a puzzle that is gradually solved through storytelling rather than exposition. The bushwhacking scenes, with David wandering the Tasmanian wilderness showing off his survival skills and killing wallabies, are largely without dialogue and similarly efficient. The one aspect of the film that I found to strike a false note was in David’s relationship with the young family he stays with, the Armstrongs. His growing attachment to them is important to the narrative and to his character development, but I found the decision to go down the surrogate husband/father route overly predictable, and awfully heavy-handed considering how unnecessary it was. The same emotional effect could have probably been achieved in a less clichéd fashion by sticking with the grumpy outsider finding a heart, instead of all the conspicuous filling-in of roles the missing father should have been doing. At least it’s mitigated by a surprisingly brutal twist.
Although it’s fairly even-handed in its approach to the loggers and their livelihood, there’s no doubting which side of the argument the filmmakers come down on. The Tasmanian wilderness is shot to give its awesome beauty as much impact as possible; from swerving aerial shots over its forests and lakes right down to the level of the animals living among the rocks and shrubs. Damp and teeming, it’s as far away as possible from the burning wasteland that appears in most people’s minds when you mention Australia, and also places the film firmly in the “greeny” camp. It doesn’t take this view simplistically, however, but examines how such motives can hide darker ones, or become corrupted in other ways. The elemental subject is that of self-interest vs altruism, and the interplay between the two. This is most clearly stated in the tensions between the loggers and the environmentalists, and can be seen further in the operations of Red Leaf, whose desire to find a final specimen of an extinct species thinly veils a questionable money-grabbing scheme. But it also functions as the film’s engine, as we watch David’s self-interest in finding the tiger lead him directly to caring for the Armstrong family; while they may hold the key to the discovery of the specimen, they also embody the human fallout from quests such as these. The Hunter is a thoughtful mystery that engages with some relevant and topical questions without being pushy or too assertive, and wraps them in an effective and good-looking thriller.
Tom
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