There's been something interesting going on in Australian cinema in recent years. A country once dominated by Brits and Peter Weir, where it seems every other Hollywood star comes from (can you think of an action movie or costume drama in the last 15 years that didn't have one Aussie in it?) has strangely produced only a small amount of fresh directing and writing talent. And yet there seems to be something bubbling down there. A handful of interesting, if not totally successful, films in the past few years have come to represent some sort of renaissance downunda.
One of the standouts from this new class is the recent film The Hunter, directed by Daniel Nettheim, adapted by Alice Addison from a novel by Julia Leigh. This is a very elegant contemporary Western set in the mysterious world of ecoterrorism, bio-pharmacology and extreme survivalism. Martin David (Willem Dafoe) is some sort of extreme-outdoorsman-for-hire who is given the mysterious task of researching the possible existence of Tasmanian tigers, long though to be extinct, by a mysterious bio-tech company. Martin is a total badass, like a Bear Grylls with a gun and no camera crew.
He gets to his Tasmanian base camp in the home of a rural single mother, depressed after the mysterious disappearance of her outdoorsman husband, and her two young kids (super charming and sweet kids... and I don't really get kids). He finds that he's totally unwelcome by the locals who are loggers and figure his work will result in them losing their work. He's also pressured by the environmental hippies who monitor the actions of the loggers. He goes into the wilderness looking for signs of tigers (which are really closer to wolves than big cats), and finds himself being stalked along the way. Back at the base camp, he improves the lives of the broken family he's living with, but the attention he brings might also be risking their safety as well.
I know very little about Tasmania, but apparently it's rugged and beautiful, looking a lot like Alaska or the woody parts of the upper Midwest. It's one of those places that looks so good on screen that you wonder whether it's beautiful cinematography (by Robert Humphreys) or just photography of a gorgeous place. Nettheim has a nice touch, using lots of helicopter shots, which can frequently be cliche, but help here to get a sense of the bigness of the spaces and the smallness of people.
Isolation and loneliness is a repeated theme throughout the film, as there is only minimal music used (mostly diegetic) and lots of silence. Dafoe has a stoic calmness, that's somewhat unsettling and also strangely kind (he seems to be a good guy in the way he deals with the family). The two kids are clearly desperate for his attention when he arrives at their house, partly because they're young and happy, but mostly because they're incredibly lonely and are looking for some sort of attention or break from their dull lives.
Perhaps the idea is that in the conflict between nature and humans, the sides are not evenly matched. As Martin seems to be the best human out there to unlock the secrets of the wilderness for a company who hopes to do something probably ugly with his findings, he is outmatched, a small being in the vastness of the outback (think of astronaut Dave Bowman floating through the silence and coldness of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But there's also a feeling that in the human world, we don't even give one another basic assistance in the form of love or kindness, which turns us into lone wolves in our daily lives. Business interests try to exploit this for financial gain, creating a conflict between those who want to connect to others and those who would rather hurt one another, between those who want to live with nature and who want to constantly battle against it.
There is a unspeakable sadness that pervades the film, eerily, heartbreakingly brought to life when Martin gets the family's turntable working and Springsteen's song "I'm On Fire". The missing dad had previously hooked speakers up into the trees, so when the music comes on, the area is surrounded by the melancholy song, reminding us of the relative silence that preceded it.
At times Nettheim get's a bit tied up in banal script elements, like his poor reception from the locals when he arrives or a overly sentimental penultimate scene. Still, he does a really interesting job otherwise with a story that doesn't really feel like a masterpiece.
The Hunter is a good solid movie, and although it's not perfect, it is a lot of fun and a clever twist on a classic Western talk of an outsider coming into a small town to shake things up.
Stars: 3 of 4
