The Hunter      2011

Director: 

Daniel Nettheim

Stars:

 Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill and Morgana Davies

There is Technology and Commerce, and then there is Nature, and Love.  The tension between the two was so perfectly captured in this film by Daniel Nettheim, who prior to this work has been almost strictly a TV director with 20+ titles in his resume.  This work in other hands could have been so strictly surgical and pedantic, giving way easily to formulaic exposition.  But Nettheim must have stuck to the script by Alice Addison, and played it by film school rules.  There was very little TV about this, so credit goes to Nettheim for breaking out of his other work, and probably shows a heart that beats in celluloid.

The love relationship that I spoke of was nestled in the slowly developed lead male/lead female roles, he waking she from a slumber brought on by mismanagement of her drugs.  When he arrives, it is a prosaic metaphor for the condition of the land and the people, in lethargy, asleep, a dream gone by, speakers in the trees, once a small “Woodstock”.  Now with a bit of electrical help, and some black tape, instead of Grace Slick, or “The Boss”, as our young male hero says he loves, we have classical music in the trees.  This was a delightful awakening, and softens us to DaFoe’s position as the lead character who it seems must carry out a job that is not to his liking. 

The suspicion of the locals and their apathy are well-earned, as it turns out, for commerce and technology neither one have yielded for them any other turn of events than a slow deterioration and joblessness.  The jealousy of the University workers by the locals is not one of ignorance or a discrepancy of IQ, as so many other “social” situation stories of the past have painted rivals of this kind (ala Breaking Away or Dirty Dancing), but one of a kind of rape, a kind of victimization and a hard reality that beats against all of the idealism that academia and research can bring, without, of course, any kind of recompense for the raped, except being used.

I think it might have been more appropriate to name this film, “The Last Tanzanian Tiger”, rather than The Hunter, simply because the tiger was indeed what the film was all about, and not the hunter.  The Hunter weeps over the Tiger, as it turns out, a kind of repentance for being caught in the jaws of the wheels of fortune and reduced to chemical manipulations, the only interest being that of an unknown neurotoxin, and a cold business of putting the natural at the behest of machinist interest.

DeFoe’s character is us, caught up in the need and drive of cultures that are driven by the dollar, so therefore there is a metaphor here for the old capitalist/socialist switch, freedom of expression and living within environments and the means of the land, being staid 60s leftover conventions, that in some cases as this, still hold true, or at least hold up a good argument for consideration.  There is never a crime in examining the natural course of things as first consideration before you dig, or kill.  Captured was probably his goal, but as envy would have it, not the goal of “the company”.  And romance is killed in the end as consequence.  There is no female lover to take home, or beautiful daughter, but only a boy, a promise of a future to start again, to teach this lesson to one damaged, and start again.