15 - Parental Abandonment and the Trauma of Loss: Boy (Taika Waititi, 2010)

Summary

As the new century entered its second decade, the runaway hit Boy (Taika Waititi, 2010) announced a noteworthy flourishing of films by Māori filmmakers portraying the experience of Māori children coming of age. There had intermittently been precursors – notably Merata Mita's Mauri (1988) and other films with coming-of-age elements, such as Barry Barclay's Ngati (1987) and Lee Tamahori's Once Were Warriors (1994) – but Boy, which was soon to be followed by Mahana (Lee Tamahori, 2016) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016), attests to an enlarged audience interest in seeing Māori experience depicted on screen.

All of these films have been unusually successful at the New Zealand box office, relative to the size of the population (4.5 million in 2016). Boy, when it was released in 2010, garnered $6,750,042, outperforming such international hits as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part One) ($4,486,256), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse ($4,113,338), and Iron Man 2 ($2,701,225), and breaking all previous New Zealand records. Even this record was shattered by Taika Waititi's next coming-of-age film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which achieved a staggering $8,703,282, the scale of which can be judged by comparison with the figures for American blockbusters released that year: Captain America: Civil War ($3,480,235), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ($3,269,068), and X-Men: Apocalypse ($1,924,905). Clearly, then, there is something about these New Zealand-made films that has touched a chord with the national audience, which raises questions that this chapter will attempt to address.

THE RECEPTION OF BOY AT HOME AND ABROAD

A number of critics and scholars did not share the wildly enthusiastic response of New Zealand spectators to Boy, and their negative criticism points to aspects of the film that it is important to explore. When Boy had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Peter Debruge, reviewing the film for Variety, was highly dismissive, labeling the film ‘a let-down’ on account of the fact that, in his opinion, ‘Waititi has scrubbed away all culturally specific traits from his growing-up Kiwi comedy,’ meaning that, ‘Without that arthouse-ready anthropological edge … “Boy's” prospects look more cult than commercial.’ For Debruge, then, the film lacked the cultural exoticism that would give an impression of authenticity.