Tuesday, March 25, 2008
A war criminal hunting, they will go
With the tight DVD release schedule and the movie studios continuing to pander to 14 year olds, there is an entire range of reasonably good films that end up getting their major access and exposure to their audiences when they are released on DVD. The Hunting Party came and went before I had a chance to see it.
A primary inspiration for this film is a October 2000 Esquire article about journalists from a Bosnia reporters reunion traveling for vacation on the Adriatic being mistaken as CIA looking for Radovan Karadžić. The film does not tell that story so much as use it as a premise for departure. To me it is a convergence of David O Russell's Three Kings and Oliver Stone's Salvador. Richard Gere is the update on Salavdor's James Woods and Terrence Wood takes the Jim Belushi cameraman role, more or less. The ambiguity of the modern political landscape provides the setting much like Three Kings. One of the key elements of the original article that made it to the screen is the concept of the reporters being identified as CIA being in the gray.
Or as the lieutenant colonel in the article said (paraphrased by a counterpart in the movie) said when multiple parties had presumed the journalists to be CIA: "...you should know is that I am with the Light Side. The guys on their way here, the ones taking over this operation, they're from the Dark Side." Another slow, meaningful look around the car. "You all are in what we call the Gray Zone."
Post-war Bosnia was indeed not a black and white issue for the world at large. As Scott Anderson explains in the Esquire article:" For years, NATO governments and the UN had been proclaiming that true peace could never come to Bosnia until fugitive war criminals like Karadzic were caught. At the same time, most had done absolutely nothing to bring that about, fearful of the unrest that might ensue and give the lie to the charade of peace and nation-rebuilding they had created."
And to this backdrop comes a somewhat independent spirited entertainment, and it is entertaining enough not to be dismissed although it teeters on Hollywood Cheese Whiz. What saves it besides the setting and improbable circumstance are a couple nice twists of plot and the likes of Terrence Howard, who I am very much enjoyed in the wacky Outkast speakeasy musical Idlewild and in the gritty southern pimp hop drama Hustle & Flow. I've read also that he does a fine job as Brick in the new Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Richard Gere's deadbeat journalist character wears a little thin. He is deadbeat but mainly because he is haunted by tragic events from the Bosnian war. Oh brother. And Jesse Eisenberg, who played the twerpy teenager in The Squid and the Whale as the network's Vice President in his first adult adventure is pretty grating and tiresome from the beginning. His presence threatens to turn it into "Old buddies and the newbie" movie with his role mainly an excuse for extrapolating the backstory of buddies Gere and Howard.
Yet The Hunting Party is worth one's time. The story moves along well and it is worth to giving writer-director Richard Shepard credit for trying something different with setting and set-up even though some tired conventions and stock characters sometimes threaten to cancel out some of the film's originality.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 AM
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