THE STORY – In an attempt to save the threatened ecosystem, the Florida government hosts an annual competition to remove invasive pythons from the Everglades. For ten grueling nights, python-mania overtakes the ‘glades as an eclectic group of amateur hunters contends with unforgiving terrain, aggressive nocturnal creatures, and their own desires and demons that push them into the swamp, searching for slithering glory.
THE CAST – Toby Benoit, Jimbo McCartney, Shannon McCartney, Madison Oliveira, Richard Perenyi, Anne Stratton Hilts & Joe Wasilewski
THE TEAM – Xander Robin (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 91 Minutes
Every year in the state of Florida, the state government runs a ten-day contest to see who can kill the most pythons in the Everglades. The invasive species has been decimating the local wildlife there for decades, and the state has decided that the best way to combat it is to let as many people as want to live out their big-game-hunter fantasy in hopes of a $10,000 cash prize. Yes, this is a real thing, and no, somehow there hasn’t been a reality television series based around it yet. Thankfully, now we have Xander Robin’s “The Python Hunt,” a riveting ride of a documentary that follows six would-be snake hunters through the contest. They all have their reasons for participating, whether it’s personal glory, the desire to save the local wildlife, or basic bloodlust. They’re reflective of the country, a remarkable melting pot of people willingly participating in a state-sanctioned game that essentially amounts to unpaid labor on the part of the players. Robin covers the Python Hunt from nearly every angle, painting a portrait of a small slice of the country that eventually has some pretty damning things to say about the country at large.
The film’s strongest element is surely its casting. With hundreds of people from all over the world coming to participate, it can’t have been easy to find the right group of people to follow, but everyone the film follows has a completely unique reason for being there, and they all upend expectations in some way. There’s wildlife biologist Joe, who’s been hunting snakes for fifty years; Madison, a former Marine who says of the random guys she’s hunting with, “every boy is trainable.” Ricky, an elementary school science teacher from San Francisco, microdoses ecstasy before hunting each night, while retiree Anne, who just wants so badly to stick a knife into a python’s skull and scramble their brains around, scoffs when others offer her beer because she only drinks “real spirits” like gin. Anne has hitched her wagon to Toby, a self-described “eighth-generation Florida cracker” who works as a hunting guide when he’s not writing for his local newspaper. A motley crew of big personalities that fear neither introspection nor looking cringe-worthy on camera, the cast is any documentary producer’s dream. While Anne and Toby are more obvious types (the sweet-looking grandma with a violent streak and the backwoods poet, respectively), watching them interact with each other is never less than compelling. The out-of-place Ricky, dangerously unself-aware precisely because he thinks he’s self-aware, provides golden unintentional comedy, shaving off his mountain man beard at one point because he doesn’t want the locals to see him as “some yokel from San Francisco,” only to leave behind a bushy horseshoe mustache paired with braided pigtails that couldn’t be more stereotpyically hippy-dippy San Francisco liberal if he tried (the horseshoe eventually gets shaved, presumably in an offscreen moment of lucidity).
It’s a good thing the cast is so compelling, since a surprisingly large amount of the hunt consists of driving around for hours in the dead of night looking for tiny aberrations in the swamps and tall grasses of the Everglades. Thankfully, there’s one more cast member to follow: Jimbo, an outspoken local who used to trap and kill pythons as a contractor for the government, who is now banned from any python trapping because he didn’t follow the rules. Jimbo’s skepticism of the hunt, which at first seems informed by his inability to participate, percolates in the background as the hunt goes on day after day, slowly revealing itself to be the film’s most indispensable element. While the hunters complain about going for days without finding any pythons, Jimbo is attending town meetings that cast doubt on whether it’s even necessary at all. No invasive reptile species has ever been fully removed from any habitat where they don’t belong, and the hunt is costly to put on. Plus, given the slowly-rising toxicity levels of the water in the Everglades, the pythons may not be the only reason for the local wildlife’s suffering. When the local Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission consists of business execs and local real estate tycoons, how much can they be trusted to put the environment first?
Everything comes to a head in the film’s last third, when Robin cuts between the official closing ceremony of the hunt and a private “python festival” put on by the Gator Hole Bar. While the official hunt ends with a sedate, businesslike awards ceremony for the hunters with the most catches, the festival at the bar includes people skinning the snakes and gleefully squishing their unhatched eggs. The two couldn’t be more different in tone, but the surface respectability of the official hunt masks the base instincts such an event brings out in its participants, which the bar’s festival unapologetically lays bare. Cross-cutting between them captures American culture in all its nasty glory: Surface politeness doing its best to conceal a raging, hedonistic id. If Robin’s overuse of closeups and frame rate changes gild this particular lily a bit too much, at least elsewhere, it gives the film a distinctive look that captures southern Florida in a way that feels both authentic and unlike other depictions of the region. As a native of the Everglades, Robin knows these lands and these people better than most in the audience, and he presents them with a love as clear-eyed as it is all-consuming. His passion radiates through every frame of the film, making “The Python Hunt” so much more than it appears at first glance. This isn’t just some quirky look at an obscure American event and subculture or a love letter to the filmmaker’s home state; it’s a sly indictment of 21st-century America, wrapped up in what looks like a trashy thrill ride. It is pretty thrilling, to be sure, but much like how our intrepid hunters learn that the hunt is much more driving around in the dark than stalking and killing snakes, it’s not what you expect. For both the hunters and the audience, that’s for the best.
