Xander Robins’ documentary “The Python Hunt” is ostensibly about the native Floridians and out-of-state visitors who descend on the Everglades once a year to kill pythons for money. The pythons are from Myanmar, formerly Burma. They were never part of Florida’s homegrown ecosystem. That was for the best. They’re a reptilian plague that will happily consume that ecosystem. unless humans wade into the swamps and kill as many as they can.
The government of Florida is not only OK with this, but it also created the program that lured these people. They’ve traveled to the Sunshine State hoping to slay snakes and make money. Some seem as if they’re mainly in it to kill another living creature, albeit not one that engenders much sympathy. There is some disagreement amongst the interviewees as to whether pythons are objectively evil or even innately aggressive. But everyone agrees that they’re a problem. According to the movie, 90% of Florida’s native species have been devoured by pythons over the last few decades, including indigenous frogs, deer, wild pigs, and alligators.
One hunter, Anne Stratton, a bespectacled senior citizen, tells the filmmakers that what she really wants to do is hold a python’s head down and scramble its brain with a knife. She lost her husband recently, and it seems like killing pythons is her way of working through the grief. “My husband would have loved this,” she peals. Her partner and guide, who’s so much bigger than Anne that he looks like he could unhinge his own jaw and swallow her whole, is Toby Benoit, a local writer. He provides running commentary on the event as the film chronicles it. He’s lyrical but folksy. Imagine a sportscaster who’s a poet on the side.
Some of these pythons were bought as pets by flighty humans. The buyers thought the snakes were cute when they were little, but became horrified when they grew up to become, you know, adult pythons—like the kind they’d surely seen in picture books or on nature documentaries, but apparently forgot about. Most of them arrived in Florida by way of an exotic pet dealer who had 900 baby alligators in his inventory, but lost them to the wild when a hurricane destroyed the warehouse where they were kept. They can grow up to 20 feet long, can digest a fully grown man, and, according to a government official who’s helping to direct the hunt, each one can lay 100 eggs.
Robins’ presentation of the hunt—ably edited by Max Allman, and shot by David Bolen and Matt Clegg in a color palette that could be called Neon Rot—might remind viewers of the sequence in “Jaws” where the mayor of Amity Island offers a bounty to anyone who can kill the shark. The offer triggers a mad rush by a clownish armada of tourists, creating a drunken traffic jam at sea. Very few of these people look like they were born to hunt pythons. One of them, Richard Pernyi, is a bearded 40-year-old San Francisco schoolteacher whose wife sweetly hugs him goodbye in their driveway like he’s leaving for a pickleball tournament. “What are you running from?” someone teases him at his going-away party. Richard can’t come up with an answer then, but comes up with one later: “Nuthin’! I’m runnin’ TO stuff.”
A native Floridian, Jimbo McCartney (what amazing names in this movie!) disparages the event as “the Burning Man of snake hunts,” for the staggering number of self-destructive dummies it draws to the Everglades each year. “These yahoos piss me off,” he growls.
The movie is a lot of fun and masters a pleasingly detached yet sardonic tone early on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a lot more to offer after that, aside from a growing human menagerie of admittedly lively characters and a philosophical through line that’s pretty worn out—something like, “Humans are the real monsters.” Toby the newspaperman says, “Humans—we’re good at destroying things, and hopefully we can destroy these pythons.” I.e., solve the problem that humanity itself created. The metaphor of the firefighter-arsonist comes to mind and applies to most of the human race.
Spoiler alert: they don’t know what they’re doing, and are doomed to disappointment. And the world spins on.
