Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

Taika Waititi's 2016 adaptation of Barry Crump's Wild Pork and Watercress arrives with a great deal of warmth and almost none of the ideological apparatus that later became his house style. Sam Neill and Julian Dennison play a foster uncle and his reluctant charge, and the film's pleasures are old-fashioned: a chase, a dog, a waterfall, a boy learning to shoot straight. The cast is heavily Māori and Pacific Islander, which is simply what a New Zealand production looks like. Nobody in the film announces this, and nobody in the film needs to.

The social observation here is real but thin on the ground. Ricky is a ward of the state, shuffled between homes and labeled a delinquent, and the child welfare bureaucracy is drawn as petty and vindictive. That is a critique of an institution, not of an economic order, and the film never reaches for a larger argument about race or class. Bella is a warm maternal presence who dies early. Paula Hall is a determined antagonist in a government lanyard. Neither is deployed in service of anything resembling a feminist reading, and the bush itself is a survival comedy set, not a climate parable. Ricky's build generates a few affectionate gags and no message whatsoever.

Where the film earns its acclaim is in its refusal to lecture. Any point about the foster system is folded into character and joke, delivered sideways, and the result is a movie that trusts its audience to feel something without being told what to feel. We are left with a generous, funny adventure about two people who need each other. In the current cultural climate that restraint reads as almost radical. It is not, of course. It is just good filmmaking, and the classification reflects that.