In The Hunting Party, Terrence Howard plays Duck, a TV cameraman who's worked with hotshot reporter Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) for years. Together they form an award-winning team that's covered the hottest war zones of recent history: El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq. They thrive on both their celebrity and the adrenaline rush they get off the danger. Of course Duck always finds himself in the greater danger and he has the scars and bullet wounds to prove it. But one day, when the news he's reporting hits too close to home, Simon snaps. During a live feed on national television, Simon has a meltdown and is fired.
Duck gets promoted to a cushy job as a in studio cameraman working with the well-preserved network anchor (James Brolin in a surprisingly funny turn) while Simon falls off the map. But Duck and Simon are destined to meet up again and they do precisely that in Bosnia, the scene of Simon's public humiliation. But Simon has a pitch for Duck: would he come with him to shoot what promises to be a world exclusive interview with Bosnia's most wanted war criminal, The Fox? Simon claims to know The Fox's whereabouts -- something the CIA and the U.N. are also supposed to trying to determine -- and the idea proves irresistible to Duck. Tagging along is Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg of The Squid and the Whale ), a very green journalist who just happens to be the son of a network VP. So off they head to find the mysterious Fox ... and by the way, did I mention that there's also a multi-million dollar bounty on The Fox's head? Maybe that's because Simon's not quite sure what he's really after, a career-making story or heaps of money. But whether it's ambition or greed or possibly even revenge, none is very honorable.
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Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg in The Hunting Party (The Weinstein Co.)
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Shepard begins and ends The Hunting Party with the kind of sharp and savage satiric edge needed to hit its mark and be successful. Duck's opening narration describing the sometimes absurd world of TV journalism and the humorous end credits telling us which "facts" in the film were true and which were false (as if we can trust such fact checking) make for a brilliant ten-minute film. Unfortunately, there's about 80 minutes in-between, causing the film looses sight of its target and unsteadily wavers between satire and bleeding heart political commentary.
The Hunting Party desperately needed the reckless irreverence found in the first half of Three Kings (but that film too fell into moralistic preaching at the end). Tone is absolutely crucial to satire, especially one that wants us to laugh at war, violence and brutality. The problem is that Shepard also wants us to cry at the tragedies he depicts and that's where he runs into trouble. Trying to switch back and forth between the laughter and the tragedy takes a much more skilled hand than Shepard currently has. In The Matador he managed the tonal shifts better, but then his subject matter (a burned out hit man indoctrinating a average Joe into his violent world) was easier to make light of and contained no grand social message.
Danis Tanovic, the Bosnian director of No Man's Land, understands how to walk that fine line between the horrors and the humor of war. When I interviewed him in 2001 about the humor in his Oscar-winning No Man's Land, he said, "I can definitely compare it to Jewish humor ... it was kind of secret weapon. When you're in a situation like we were in Bosnia, and Sarajevo especially, and we didnt have any weapons to defend ourselves, where the world was just hypocrite about everything that was happening there, we had a siege for four years, people killing everyday, then you need a way out, and for us, the way out was humor. It's a very good weapon, and then humor gives you distance between you and the problem."
Shepard, maybe because he didn't experience these horrors first hand, doesn't know how to maintain the proper distance and how to mix that distance in with his satiric assault on the absurdities of contemporary conflicts and the mass media. Even his filming and editing style change to reflect his tonal uncertainties. In the open and close, there's a fast-paced, ironic sensibility that has some zing and crackle to it. But then Shepard, like both the film and the characters, goes a bit soft and preachy for the bulk of the film.
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After the Fox...The Hunting Party (The Weinstein Company)
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The actors are solid but again, the problems arise in the more subtle shadings of their characters. While Simon is a media superstar, Gere maintains the proper flippant tone that allows us to laugh at him and be somewhat cahrmed. But when Simon develops a social and political conscience, Gere tries to invest him with too serious a tone and he looses the ability to play up the absurdities that still remain in the character. Howard, who's always a pleasure to watch, also has trouble navigating the minefield of Shepard's wannabe political satire. Only Eisenberg, as the newbie, seems to find and maintain a comic tone that works throughout the film.
As with the recent Blood Diamond , Shepard uses journalists to give us our history lessons and to lecture us about all the things the United States has failed to do or has just simply screwed up. It's not that the information is bad -- in fact, in both cases, it's information that needs to get out there -- but rather that the style of delivering the information is flawed. Good filmmaking means using artistry to wrap up your message. Shepard, at some moments, could have just as easily put his characters' dialogue up on a chalkboard to read, that's how blatant and unadorned some of his points are.
The Hunting Party (rated R for strong language and some violent content) represents a missed opportunity. Shepard has displayed the writing and directing skills to deliver a crisp, dark comedy, but this time, his need to also deliver a message seems to have gotten in the way. Shepard has cited Orson Welles' The Third Man as an influence and maybe he needs to go back and watch it again with a particular eye for Welles' mastery of tone and storytelling.
Companion viewing: The Third Man, No Man's Land , Three Kings , The Matador
