Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07

Shephard’s story of journalistic escapades is heavy on the Party

If you could say nothing else for Richard Shepard’s The Hunting Party, you’d have to give it the fact that it’s one of the most accurate portrayals of the journalistic spirit to ever hit film. Not actual journalistic life, mind you—the messes the trio of intrepid reporters get into here leave them looking a bit too much like James Bond in worse clothes—but the spirit, that blend of functional nihilism, casual cynicism and bemused tolerance that seems to mark anyone whose job it is to pay close attention to the world for extended periods of time.

Bottling that particular mélange of traits is probably the best of what Shepard gets right in his uneven follow-up to the underrated (though similarly flawed) The Matador. Where Shepard suffers the most is in trying to show that the wry frown his trio of journalists display so prominently is born of some serious and very sincere experience, not really a façade so much as a necessary reaction to living in extremes.

The Hunting Party follows disgraced former golden boy journalist Simon (Richard Gere) as he convinces former cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard), who has since traded war zones for network headquarters, and green papa’s boy Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg) to follow him into the Bosnian mountains in search of The Fox, the number one war criminal still at large some five years after the war has ended. On the way they run across protective Serbs, a midget smuggler and a UN soldier convinced they’re a CIA hit squad, on a journey that seems as much about getting in a few more kicks as it does about finding war criminals. That right there is what handcuffs some of what Shepard is trying to do. There is a fairly distressing story behind Simon’s motivations—beyond resurrecting his flagging career, that is—but taking it, or much of anything else, seriously is tough to do when the film’s main trio smirks their way through most of the action like college boys on a road trip. The obvious tonal analogue is David O Russell’s Desert Storm satire Three Kings, but the comparison that kept springing to my mind was a failed 24 Hour Party People: unlike Russell, but much like Michael Winterbottom, Shepard’s revelling in a world of pronounced moral ambiguity, but he can’t seem to make any of the tragedies actually hit home for the viewer.

Some of the problems no doubt stem from the cast. Though Gere is surprisingly adept as a scoundrel whose primary charms have been drowned in grain alcohol, neither of his contemporaries seems particularly well-suited to their roles. Eisenberg, who was perfect as the deluded teenager in Squid and the Whale, frequently comes across as too glib and nebbishy here, while Howard, who has a bit of a habit being the good part of bad movies, flips that talent here, drifting through a role that never really rises above a flat foil for Gere to play off of.

Still, there are plenty of high points. The aforementioned journalistic ethos-capturing aside, so long as things don’t try to get too serious, Shepard keeps the film brisk and frothy, and it’s awfully hard not to root for Simon’s haphazard attempts at spiritual and professional redemption, if only because his cavalier attitude restores some faith in journalism as a profession. V

Opens Friday
The Hunting Party
Written and Directed by Richard Shepard
Starring Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg

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