Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.Willem Dafoe has played many roles in his career, ranging from T. S. Eliot and Max Schreck to a vampire hunter and sundry psychopaths, cops, and Green Goblins. Rarely is found in that resume, however, a recognizably everyday human being. There's something in that vulpine face and sandpaper voice which translates poorly to the workaday. Even when playing a secondary character in a straight-laced drama like The English Patient, he comes burdened with a name like David Caravaggio and missing his thumbs. Given this background when considering The Hunter, one would think that a role like that of Martin, the hired gun who is sent into the wilds of Tasmania to kill the last of a long-thought-extinct species, would be a natural fit for Dafoe's otherworldliness. In this unfocused and highly antidramatic film, though, Dafoe is measured for a role that requires him to be empathic and exceedingly normal; it doesn't fit.
Based on a novel by Julia Leigh (whose writing and directing debut Sleeping Beauty is about as passive as this one), Daniel Nettheim's film aims for big game. Starting in an anonymous airport and hotel where Martin has been waiting for his orders, the film contrasts his world of modern disconnection with the rugged beauty of the place he's being sent to. The opening scenes have the chilly thrill of some industrial espionage thriller, like Abel Ferrara's sketchy but moody take on William Gibson's story New Rose Hotel (co-starring a more appropriately cast Dafoe). His job is to find the last surviving Tasmanian Tiger, a species thought to have died out in the 1930s but which may have been sighted. The hiring firm is a military biotech company that wants biological samples for its research, setting up an effectively villainous plot that augurs a mighty moral reckoning. Once Martin arrives in Tasmania, however, the story goes awry in two quite dramatic ways.
First there is Martin's residence. Given the extreme isolation of the mountainous rainforest that he's driven into, he is stuck taking a room in a house populated by two inquisitive children and one catatonically depressed widow named Lucy (Frances O'Connor). The hippie chaos of the place is meant to contrast sharply with Martin's ascetic ways. He prefers to sit alone cleaning his rifle or taking a bath while listening to classical music, while the kids and Lucy are more about leaving messes everywhere and blasting Bruce Springsteen. It's not a subtly handled comparison. In between Martin's expeditions into the primordial wild, he grows more fond of the kids (one unconvincingly cute and precocious, the other quiet and obviously concealing an Important Plot Point) and the grieving widow. This leads into the film's second problem: Namely, that the humanizing of Martin, the cold-hearted killer-for-hire, is wholly unbelievable. Dafoe's characterization of Martin is initially appropriately detached in the presence of other people. He seems more at home in the dark-green wooded mountains, evocatively shot by Robert Humphreys, who captures the lushness of the wet landscape without overamplifying its beauty; there's danger in those trees. But once Martin warms protectively to those around him, the character requires a transformation that with Dafoe feels merely uncomfortable. On top of these issues, The Hunter is also hobbled by a misdirected dramatic arc. After creating a scenario in which Martin is pointed toward some kind of moral reckoning as well as a showdown with the locals who work for the logging industry and resent the intrusion of "greenies" like Lucy's family and Martin (who is posing as an academic). Neither comes to much of anything. Nor does the occasional popping-by of a mysterious character played by Sam Neill. One could surmise that he's there just because this is an Australian film, and Neill figured he should be involved somehow.
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