The Hunted By Peter Tonguette Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

Interestingly, even when his films are at their most non-realistic or fantasy based (as in The Exorcist [1973] or The Guardian [1990]), William Friedkin's cinema remains unfailingly committed to some principles of documentary filmmaking: for starters, the unspoken agreement between audience and filmmaker that what we are being shown on the screen is "really" happening and is being presented with a minimal of interference. Undoubtedly, this
aesthetic--which Friedkin has referred to as that of an "induced documentary"--can be traced to his early years as a documentarian, asserting its influence on nearly every one of Friedkin's subsequent feature films. As Friedkin puts it on the commentary track featured on the DVD release of his underrated Rules of Engagement (2000): "The first films I ever made were documentary films. So what I like to do is impose a documentary style on most, if not all, of the films I've made... Perhaps even starting with Boys in the Band (1970), what I've tried to do is make the audience feel as though they're watching an actual event."

The content of Friedkin's work varies dramatically from pure naturalism (i.e., Boys in the Band, The French Connection [1971]) to the aforementioned forays into more mysterious and unexplainable realms of human behavior. But his approach--his directorial vision and tone--has basically remained consistent, asking us to believe in what we are seeing on the screen--however outrageous it may be--because Friedkin's gaze seems so pure.

Other viewers may see what I regard as an emphatic, lean directness in Friedkin's work as little more than a thudding literalness. I certainly concede that there are excesses to his way of looking at the world--a willingness to present grotesque or disturbing imagery in graphic, unflinching detail is certainly one of them. But as far as I'm concerned it's part of a trade-off in which the net gain is that the world we do see is usually believable and seldom less than fully drawn.

Friedkin is a master of spaces and locales. His masterpiece, Sorcerer (1977), takes three diverse locations--Israel, Paris, and New Jersey--and converges them into one: a remote South American village which the characters from the three places--and one other--are driven to in desperation, each fleeing their home and their pasts. In Sorcerer--which details their attempt to earn their way out by transporting volitale nitroglycerine out of the country--character and location are inseparable, just as the literal events of the story are determined by the places they occur in. Friedkin has an uncanny ability to weave the real details of a place into the story: witness the famous above ground car-chase in The French Connection, a brilliant piece of cinematic montage made possible only by the existing infrastructure of New
York City.

Friedkin's new film, The Hunted (2003), provides a minimalist template for Friedkin to freely exercise some of these gifts. The film is masterful in the way it switches between and balances discrete terrains: the deep green of an Oregon forest, the chaotic order of a major urban center, the overwhelming forces of a waterfall, among them. These terrains are the spaces in which the characters act out their confrontations, the outcomes of which are
defined by their own mastery, or lack of mastery, of those spaces. Friedkin has accurately described the film as a kind of labrinthyine game of cat-and-mouse. The participants are a former marine operative, Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), who has lost his grip on reality after some horrific experiences in the war in Kosovo, and adopted his own murderous agenda, and the man who years before trained him in the art of killing, L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones). L.T. is called out of retirement to track down Aaron, currently waging "war" against deer hunters in the dark forests of Oregon.

Though Friedkin has associated himself with increasingly right-wing political agendas in recent years (i.e., Rampage [1992] and Rules of Engagement [2000]), The Hunted's script by David and Peter Griffiths and Art Monterastelli examines the un-sought after consequences of warfare on men's minds with often brutal candor. Not unlike Full Metal Jacket (1987) in this respect, the portrayal of Hallam here may be compared to that of Private Pyle in Kubrick's film, a trained killer who takes his training beyond the parameters that the military has set up for him, in doing so implicating the process which formed him.

Furthermore, the film finds its ostensible hero in L.T., an animal lover who expresses doubts about his former profession and the repercussions it's brought forth--such a character can hardly be thought of as a puppet for right-wing concerns. Characteristically, though, Friedkin--who seems to delight in confounding audience preconceptions with outbursts of sudden violence or unexpected behavior--opens the film with Bonham portrayed as a tender hearted naturalist, only to complicate that notion a scene later when L.T. beats up a local who set a trap which has injured a white wolf. In Friedkin's universe, dualities and contradictions are inherent and he feels no reason to account for them, let alone explicate them.

The Hunted is a film of breathtaking and breathless aesthetic purity, moving seamlessly from action sequence to action sequence, location to location. Whatever reservations I may have about it relate to how much Friedkin includes, not how little; if anything, I would have wished for Friedkin to pare the material down even more drastically. Pretty early on, an FBI agent
(Connie Nielsen) who L.T. comes to work with in tracking down Aaron emerges as a disposable figure in the grid of the film. (Arguably, including a female presence in the story was an attempt on Friedkin's part to provide a balance to the characteristically male driven nature of action cinema. It's a worthwhile political gesture that doesn't work simply because Neilsen's character is never made essential to the film's concerns.)

The film risks alienating itself from the mainstream of movie viewers for precisely this reason--it is a tough movie in its spareness, its refusal to define character except in broad, even contradictory, strokes. But to ask for more is in some ways to misunderstand the very nature of Friedkin's cinema: if Popeye Doyle is better drawn than L.T. Bonham it's only because the screenplay of The French Connection is superior to that of The Hunted (and that arguably Gene Hackman is an actor of greater range than Tommy Lee Jones), not because of any marked change in Friedkin's tolerance for character exposition.

After several years of unsuccessful projects and unsure steps, Friedkin has emerged with a first-rate actioner and an intriguing elaboration on his past work. In response to the oft-repeated idea that the '70s wonder boys are dried up, I offer the following recent films: Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow (2002), Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale (2002), Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if you Can (2002), Walter Hill's Undisputed (2002), and now, in all of
its single-minded spareness, The Hunted.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002