Hunt for the Wilderpeople works because Taika Waititi knows exactly when to get out of his own way. The film is adapted from Barry Crump's 1986 bestseller Wild Pork and Watercress, and Waititi brings his signature irony and comedy — he even casts himself as a wacky vicar in a droll cameo — but he resists the temptation to make it a Waititi showcase. The story and the performances do the heavy lifting, and that discipline is what lets the film keep winning audiences nearly a decade on. Sam Neill plays Hector, a grouchy, self-reliant farmer on New Zealand's North Island, working land just below the vast forested wilderness of Te Urewera. His big-hearted wife Bella, played by Rima Te Wiata, is a foster parent by vocation — and Hector is under no illusions that she married him in the same charitable spirit. The film's premise snaps into place when Bella takes in Ricky, played by Māori actor Julian Dennison, the toughest and most recalcitrant teen the state welfare system has ever processed. Rachel House's Paula, the child welfare worker on Ricky's case, is one of the film's sharpest comic creations: hatchet-faced, pitiless, and very funny. When an awful fate intervenes and Hector and Ricky are forced to go on the run together through the bush, the film becomes something close to a New Zealand national myth in miniature. A nationwide manhunt gets under way. The general public, following the story on breathless TV news reports, begins to root for this odd couple as underdog heroes. Waititi finds the comedy in the manhunt without letting it undercut the real emotional stakes underneath. The film's tonal tightrope act is its most impressive feat. Waititi systematically undercuts the sentimental possibilities of the drama — there's a running series of gags that make it look as if Hector might be mistaken for a child molester, which sounds wrong on paper and plays perfectly on screen. The Terminator exchange between Paula and Ricky in the undergrowth — Ricky insisting he's the Terminator, Paula retorting that he's more like "Sarah Connor... from the first movie, before she could do chin-ups" — is the kind of joke that only works if you've built exactly the right characters. Neill's performance is the film's anchor. He plays Hector as a man whose gruffness is not a wall but a posture — the performance is gentle and wise in a way that never announces itself. Given his recent death, watching the film now carries an additional weight that it cannot have calculated for and handles with grace simply by being what it already was: a film about a taciturn older man who discovers, reluctantly and completely, that he has something worth protecting.
