Review: THE HUNT

One of the cardinal rules of film criticism - even for bedroom-guitarist critics like me - is NEVER to damn a film for what it isn't. This is distinct from saying a comedy isn't funny or a horror movie isn't scary; that's just calling them out for not doing their jobs. No, whingeing about the absence of whatever it is about the film in front of you means that you are not describing that film. It is invalid as criticism. My distaste for Wes Anderson's films can never come from a wish that they were less twee/what they are. So, when I spoil this review right now by telling you how little I like The Hunt it is entirely based on what I saw between its credit sequences. While that's only right it's really bugging me because I'm straining against comparing it to another film. Let's see how I do.

A woman in luxury is texting with a friend who mentions the weekend's hard core fun when they'll bag a few "deplorables". Cut to a flight in a private jet filled with arrogant one-percenters. Suddenly an oafish passenger starts panicking and is subdued with eye-popping violence. Cut to lush green pastures where a group of industrially gagged people find each other but get popped off by grenades, bullets and arrows. They disperse for their lives. The hunt is on.

From this point there be spoilers so that's all the plot you're going to get here. However, you'll already have understood that it's about highly-placed liberals picking off rednecks in exactly the kind of fashion that hard-right privilege might be depicted. So people are bad all over at all levels? Not quite. This film, for its sins, does at least have some cards up its sleeve with some genuinely clever twists. So, does it work as satire?

Well, once you get over the opening twist of liberals becoming the same monsters they deplore you need somewhere to go before it just becomes an overstretched SNL skit. So, into the mix comes Manorgate, the right wing rumour come true. That's still good satire and it's still funny. But while there are pot shots aplenty at conspiracy thinking an imbalance emerges as the film itself starts to take sides. It has to do this if it wants to engage us but the way it does it starts feeling sleazy quickly.

While the hillbillies-with-modems jokes are developed to be broad here and subtle there every self-correcting liberal joke ends up as a grating replay political correctness. This means that the self-styled disenfranchised lower orders gain a little dignity and their delusional paranoia a symptom of political impotence and information poverty. It also suggests that only the comfort of extreme privilege can allow compassionate thinking which just ends up as cavernously hollow rhetoric.

The emergent protagonist (there are some funny red herrings early on with this issue) can be seen as apolitical or at best political by experience. This is necessary for the narrative alone as it keeps her struggle clean. And then in the inevitable showdown when the opposing forces are reduced to their convictions you get the big ironic reveal. It's delivered in a line of foreshadowed dialogue and it works. But, then, after the big battle and the elegant coda you realise that it doesn't. If the issue is about a misapprehension it still led to a group of leopards changing their spots. So, is everyone, high or low, left or right, really just this venal and homicidal? Is there a point, then? Even the most flamboyant or cardboard thin satire must work within its own structure. It's the comedy not being funny thing: this satire hoists itself on its own petar.

It's slick. It's bold. It's action packed and engaging. It just can't convince me that it isn't just constantly dissing me. This time, that's not a compliment. This film professes an even hand with its players but when the underdogs are actually underdogs regardless of their imagined influence and the overlords are just their real life opponents in disguise the resulting irony is just loud and lazy and, finally just self-defeating. That characters can discuss George Orwell at a moment of crisis is a writer's wink and it comes from the sort of person who wouldn't use air quotes when intoning the term "snowflake". Cynics feel entitled to be considered wise. If you consider cynicism indistinguishable from wisdom then have I got a movie for you.


PS - And I didn't have to make that comparison after all that.

The Hunt is available on Apple Movies/iTunes for the price of a full cinema ticket, not the more usual seven or eight dollars of a new release. Be aware of that.

Review: THE HUNT

We have responsibilities and Responsibility. If we shirk the former we're anything from idle and uncaring to criminal. If we violate the latter we'd better have some serious safety netting on hand as the lies can only do so much holding. If we violate it as children because our emotional wounds hurt more than our sense of propriety then correction might be out of our power: grown ups who believe the initial lie are going to resist the truth. We protect our kids.

Small town Denmark. Kindergarten teacher Lucas is accused by a child of sexual abuse. His friendships and effortless popularity drain like bathwater and he is left in a constant shiver. If he cannot reclaim any of his former status can he at least continue to live among his own when their genuine honest concern has festered into a shaking vengeance?

Director and co-writer Thomas Vinterberg exercises great care here. If there are lines that can be crossed without ill consequence (Lucas assists a child's toileting) they must be shown in contrast to other cases where it is a child who makes the crossing. The elements of the lie that young Klara tells the head teacher are clearly shown to us so that their reconstruction in warped form appears both credible and heart rending.

Vinterberg was co-architect of the Dogme95 manifesto which sought to bring cinema back to its basics. Dogme #1 was Vintenberg's Festen which remains for me the strongest of the bunch. He later made the lead-handed Dear Wendy which was a kind of attempt at comprehending the Columbine massacres of its recent history. That was hampered by its higher production values' imposition on what might have worked in the starker Dogme approach and I had to remind myself that this was the same filmmaker who in Festen had created a  moment of genuine eerieness with a few lines of dialogue and the sound of a dripping tap in the next room.

While The Hunt is not quite plain in style it is determinedly pragmatic about its cinematic responsibilities. The colours and sounds of nature and the seasons and the sensations of Christmas and the hunting of deer provide solid heft to keep aloft what might crash as overly stark melodrama. Mostly, though, Vintenberg has placed a heavy reliance on performance. It is in the performance that this film may strut its stuff.

Mads Mikkelsen, in most of the scenes of the running time, is in more ways than one, the piece's centre of gravity. He's already carrying some weight in the form of an acrimonious custody contest with his ex for care of their son. When he sees Klara lost outside the local shops we see his concern but also the inconvenience of it. When he later returns her love gift and gently instructs her about boundaries he looks like he has done it before. After the lie, the suspicion and the hate he contains the fury of his innocence and is borne, though with pain, by the dignity this affords him. When pushed too far his response is considered and controlled and the more resonant for its contrast with the brutality he has suffered.

It's Mikkelsen's power as an actor to keep this extraordinary character from being a no-cred superman. No saint, he does not suffer in silence. No vigilante, his actions have no fatal intention. He cannot live under the revulsion of his community and his actions to break it are the results of difficult thinking. His simple gait as a popular man, natural and fluent as the stag and deer he hunts, is reduced to the cautious stepping of the dog we have seen him calm. Seldom have I seen such high cheeked handsomeness and physical confidence used so effectively against itself as here.

This performance effectively distracts from the heightened playing (rather than over acting) of key characters around him whose anger must inform and shape his bearing. This is where Vinterberg has grown as a director. His sense of balance here serves him more precisely than it ever has. He's already done so much here to understate his style and push the overall approach. This is genuine craft. The upset that Lucas dares in the church is not the only redemption going on here: Vinterberg has freed himself of the feyness of Dear Wendy. We are all better for this.