This film is based on an Esquire piece by journalist Scott Anderson called What I Did on my Summer Vacation. It's the true story of a bunch of western journalists who, while hanging out in post-war Sarajevo decided on a lark to try and capture fugutive war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and came surprisingly close to succeeding. There's even a little epilogue at the end of the movie pointing out what sections of the film are based in fact. Those are also the sections of the film that don't suck like a Hoover.
The Hunting Party is an indictment of the entire studio filmmaking process. The source material practically screams out for a film adaptation. But it doesn't have the sort of "arc" and the characters don't fit the models that conventional screenwriting demands. Instead of a bunch of friends getting in over their heads, writer/director Richard Shepard creates protagonists that are recognizable to anyone who has watched more than ten movies in their lives. Richard Gere plays a former TV war correspondent fallen on hard times who reunites with Terrance Howard, his former cameraman who has gone on to better things, but still yearns for the excitement of his war zone days with Gere. They are joined on their quest to capture a fictionalized Karadzic by a green kid fresh from journalism school played by Jesse Eisenberg. Instead of going after Karadzic for the valid reasons of splitting a five million dollar reward and helping bring a war criminal to justice, Shepard invents a ridiculous backstory in order to up the dramatic stakes. You see, during the war Gere fell in love with a Bosnian muslim woman who was murdered by the Karadzic character's militia, WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT WITH GERE'S CHILD! Seriously, the bad guy is a fucking Bosnian Serb war criminal: you know, rape camps, mortar attacks on village markets, Srebrenica? Are those not enough bad acts to make a film villian hatable? It's the Titanic priniciple in action: no matter how many extras get killed by a given war/natural disaster, the audience is only going to care if one of the victims is in love with the main character. All of these elements, the friend dynamic between the two lead characters, the tortured backstory, the ginned-up action sequences, they are all there because Hollywood dogma has determined that you can't have a movie without them. But since pretty much every movie that comes down the pike has these elements, they end up feeling generic and make it harder to appreciate the parts of the film that actually happened. It doesn't take long for the cliches to pile so high that any sense of reality is buried underneath them.
Score: 5.0
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
What would this film look like if directed by Paul Greengrass? Is it cliche for me to even ask that? I think about the arc, and then immediately think of Bloody Sunday. I like to think that Greengrass would at least leave out any sort of direct connection to the characters, the love backstory b.s., and sundry other maladies of the translation to 'film'. But you are more suitable to flesh out such a hypothetical production than I. Please do so if you care to think about that.
That's actually a great idea. Greengrass's approach is so antithetical to the kind of artificial plot mechanics that plagued this movie. The only problem is that the original "true" story doesn't really have a third act, and that would have to be dealt with. Bloody Sunday and United 93 were boosted by riotious terrifying climactic sequences that were also based in reality. Any kind of action setpiece to end this story would have to be invented, and I don't know how you would do that without compromising the sense of reality.
ah yes. but that would be a step for Greengrass, and you wrote before that you think he needs to take some kind of step in his more 'artsy' films. would this be an appropriate transition from 'non'-fiction into 'fiction'? to meld the two in such a way?
his next film "Green Zone" looks to be that next step you're talking about. It's based on the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" about the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, but it doesn't have a tidy cast of characters and plot arc like the true stories of Bloody Sunday and United 93, so Greengrass will have to include some fictive elements. I'm eager to see the result.
Post a Comment