The Hunting Party
Directed by Richard Shepard
Starring Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg
Genius Products/The Weinstein Company
Available Jan. 22, 2008

There are a few ways to tell a director of a film is too cool for the room. As you can see, accompanying this review is the DVD art for The Hunting Party. Also, I asked if the DVD art for Richard Shepard’s previous film, 2005’s The Matador, could also be displayed. Now both are wonderful films, dark comedies of the highest order. But you couldn’t tell that just from looking at these two pieces of advertisement. They kinda look like they went to SpikeTV before they went to video, don’t they? There is nothing evident on either of these DVD cases of the movies contained therein.

The moral of the story? If even the studio doesn’t know how to sell your movie, and has to resort to crosshairs and explosions to promote it, then you are doing something right. It means it takes more than two sentences to describe the plot.

And Richard Shepard HAS done something right. TWICE. Before 2005, he was best known for a DTV serial killer flick called Oxygen with Maura Tierney and Adrien Brody before he won an Oscar and made a good case for having it revoked with The Village. Then Shepard made The Matador, star Pierce Brosnan got a Golden Globe nomination for it and he made a name for himself.

If I had to use base terms to describe Shepard’s follow-up, The Hunting Party, imagine those preachy, do-gooder Oscar-humpers about strife in countries a hemisphere away. Then lacquer with fifty coats of merry cynicism. Serve cold.

Richard Gere and Terrence Howard play two halves of a TV journalism duo. Howard’s the cameraman and Simon (Gere) is the correspondent. They are fully communed with the fact that as long as you aren’t in uniform fighting for your country, war can actually be an adrenaline rush, coupled with all the drinking and screwing you can do in the night hours. They’re covering Bosnia in the mid-nineties when it all becomes too personal for Simon and he has a meltdown on live television. He gets booted and has to freelance. Howard’s character, nicknamed “Duck,” actually gets promoted to the nifty gig as the personal cameraman for the network anchor (James Brolin).

Fast forward to 2000, five years after the hostilities in Bosnia officially ended, and Duck is back with the anchor and the son of the network VP (Jesse Eisenberg from The Squid and the Whale) in tow. He goes to his hotel room that night and finds Simon waiting for him, and he says he has a source that can get them an interview with a war criminal nicknamed “The Fox,” who ordered the rape and murder of thousands of Muslims during the war. Duck agrees to shoot it and drags the kid with him, only to find that Simon doesn’t want to interview The Fox.

He wants to capture him and collect the five million dollar bounty.

Movie by movie, I find that my indifference to Richard Gere hasn’t been as warranted as I thought it was. Just look at the 2007 the guy had. First you have The Hoax, in which he played the guy who was writing the fake Howard Hughes autobiography, and he was awesome. And now there’s The Hunting Party, where he brings the same playful sense of getting away with something just by the skin of his teeth. I guess Gere’s at that age where he just said “Fuck it” and decided to give his career some meaning after playing stud after stud. Terrence Howard, after a recent career surge playing unrelentingly intense characters, performs Duck as a guy quick to smile and is finding every chapter of his journey through Bosnia as unbelievable as we are. And Eisenberg as the kid lets off that Michael Cera vibe. Only, unlike Cera, he comes away as “smart” and not “smiley-‘tarded.”

What I really like about The Hunting Party is that it takes a real place with real people and real problems and doesn’t beat us with the guilt-stick. Everyone in the wake of the Bosnian conflict, from the victims to the perpetrators, has an angle. They willingly exploit the need for resources and information for their own personal gain. Instead of treating us like we’re idiots and standing constantly agape at how horrible the situation is (like Babel), The Hunting Party sees this through the eyes of its jaded main characters. This is nothing new to them, so why should they act like it? This gives way to the absurdity found throughout the film, with informants, enforcers, spies, and double agents. They all aren’t who they say they are, and they don’t take Simon and his crew at face value either, thinking these journalists are CIA, even though they don’t LOOK like they’re CIA. But then again, why would the CIA send someone who looks like they’re in the CIA? This comes up more than once, with humorous results.

Speaking of humor, I really like the wild fluctuations in tone with The Hunting Party. Some people found it “scattershot,” or “schizophrenic,” but I want my movies to be unlike all the other ones. When you’ve seen it all, as these characters have, your need for gallows humor goes way up, and you’ll find it come hell or high water. Even David Tattersall’s cinematography finds patent absurdity with just the shooting of Sarajevo. He desaturates the color while focusing his shots on bright objects. This is a hellhole with a very high opinion of itself.

What I think it’s about, though, is laughing so that one does not cry. I don’t like getting whipped and beaten into feeling horrible. I’ve read the message boards at IMDB on this film, and I haven’t seen more whiney, self-important bitching outside of couples-counseling or Green Party fundraisers. This isn’t about the war, but about the dark humor of three men who covered its wake, and how they build up a situational wall around themselves so they don’t fall into the abyss. It does the same for us. Hell, even the end credits are snarky. The Hunting Party is “based on a true story,” and they were nice enough to tell us what was real in the film and what wasn’t.

Thank God the dwarf was real…

***1/2 out of 4

DVD Bonus Features

Also included on the DVD are the trailer, a “making of” featurette, deleted scenes, and director commentary. The two features of real interest, however, is a video where Shepard interviews the journalists featured in the original Esquire magazine article the film was based on. The other is the actual article, entitled “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.” Apparently one of the journalists on the hunt in Bosnia was Sabastian Junger, who wrote The Perfect Storm. Whoda thunk?