In Richard Shepard's last film, the black comedy The Matador, a depressive middle-aged hit man no longer quite up to the job and a failing businessman meet and form an offbeat friendship as they helped one another through their respective midlife crises. Richard Gere stars in Shepard's new pitch-black comedy-drama, The Hunting Party, as a middle-aged war correspondent who flamed out of the job seeks redemption with the help of a pair of younger colleagues. If these two movies are any indication, Shepard is on the fast track to becoming the bard of male midlife angst. The Matador was pure delight, but The Hunting Party is more substantial as it touches on recent world history and through the fun-house mirror of this journalistic trio's adventures asks some pertinent questions of how events have played out.
It was during the Bosnian conflict that TV reporter Simon (Gere) melted down live on the air. He lost his high-profile job, but remains on the margins, a freelancer for increasingly small markets. His cameraman, Duck (Terrence Howard), returned to New York and moved up into the executive suite. Among his colleagues is naïve, recent Harvard graduate Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg) who got his job as a nascent TV producer through family connections, but longs to prove himself worthy of the gift. All three men travel to Sarajevo for special anniversary ceremonies celebrating the end of the war.
Simon has little interest in that public relations story. He thinks he has uncovered the whereabouts of Boghanovic a/k/a "The Fox" (Ljobomir Kerekes), a notorious Serbian war criminal. Not only is there a big fat reward on the man's head, but capturing him would catapult Simon back to the big leagues. But it is not a story he can work alone. He enlists a reluctant Duck into his quixotic quest, and Benjamin comes along for the ride.
Shepard says he is a great admirer of Carol Reed's postwar classic The Third Man, and there is a little of that in this portrait of a society still suffering the hangover from bloody conflict. It is also often oddly picaresque as the trio takes to the road in a stolen rental car, meeting villagers along the way in encounters sometimes pleasant, sometimes menacing, sometimes both. Shepard was able to shoot on location and like Liev Schreiber's Everything Is Illuminated, The Hunting Party, the drama is heavy on atmosphere, reveling in the unfamiliar.
But even as one is laughing at Simon's antics, there is an awareness that this is a place where something horrible happened and the wounds are still fresh. One only need look as far as the ski lifts outside of Sarajevo that Duck and Simon point out to Benjamin on their way out of town. A key location of the 1984 Olympics, they became sniper nests during the war and the ski runs are threaded with landmines, effectively destroying a one-time winter paradise.
Like Clifford Hunt, the writer Gere played in the recent The Hoax, there is something of the charming scoundrel about Simon, albeit a scoundrel who could probably use some meds. In contrast, Duck is game, but responsible, and often exasperated by his friend's antics, which endanger all their lives. Benjamin is the wild card, nervous and fearful, but smart and more capable than he even realizes until the group is backed into a corner. The quest might be ridiculous with a different cast of characters, but with these three, it is a delight following them on their impossible journey.
Shepard based his screenplay on a real incident when a group of journalists really did try to track down notorious war criminal Radovan Karadicz, but only that premise remains as he completely transforms the story. Dylan Baker shows up toward the end of the movie in a priceless cameo as a nameless CIA operative, making explicit what has been mostly implied, that certainly mass-murdering thugs get away with it because it is in some nations' interest that they not get caught. The revelation does not detract from The Hunting Party's delightfully breezy tone, but it is unsettling and as the movie fades to black, it leaves one with something to think about.
— PAM GRADY
In 