Harrison's Flowers (2000)

I don't know what it is that made me decide to give this movie a try. All I knew was that this was some kind of war movie from an unknown French director, with Andie MacDowell - not exactly my most favorite actress - and Adrien Brody - who was excellent in "The Pianist", but who I didn't see play in any other movie since. Those aren't exactly strong reasons why I shouldn't miss it and yet I was willing to give it a try, probably because I hoped to be surprised by it. And that's exactly what it did.

Harrison Lloyd is a photojournalist who has already won a Pulitzer price with his photographs of several wars. But he now has a wife and two children and he doesn't want to go to another war-zone anymore, because he is afraid that he might die while doing his job. He wants to change jobs, but his boss has given him one last assignment. He'll have to travel to ex-Yugoslavia, where the civil war has just started. What appears to be a small incident at first, quickly proves to be one of the most gruesome wars in recent history and it doesn't take long before Harrison is missing, presumably dead. But his wife Sarah refuses to believe that he's no longer alive and decides to go after him and to look for him. As she penetrates deeper into the war zone, she is confronted with all the horrors that were committed in this war: random executions of soldiers and civilians, rape, snipers, the uncertainty of where and who the enemy is,...

At first I must say that I didn't like this movie all too much. This seemed to be like yet another Hollywood product about a perfect and happy family who is all a sudden thorn apart by some unfortunate event, who learns to deal with the pain, building up a new life without the missing person and so on, and so on. Nothing new, nothing special. But then it all started to change... a lot. As soon as she is in ex-Yugoslavia, being confronted with all the horrors of that civil war, it was as if I was struck by lightening. Never have I seen so much realistic images in a movie about this war. This started to feel more like a documentary, rather than like a movie. It was all so incredibly realistic and I can't say that they have left anything out. Young children murdered and raped; soldiers and civilians, man and woman, old and young,... executed in front of your eyes; all the explosions and the attacks;... It seems like you're all witnessing it live, as if you are seeing it through the eyes and the lenses of the photojournalists yourself. It was incredible...

The performances in this movie are more than OK and Andie MacDowell was a pleasant surprise in this one, although I must say that I liked her performance a lot more once she was the journalist in ex-Yugoslavia. Before that I sometimes found her acting a bit too much and quite unrealistic (take for instance the several scenes in which she is constantly falling when she hears bad news). I didn't really have the feeling that the wife of a war photographer, who constantly lives with this kind of uncertainty, would act and react the way she did. But as I said before, I forgot about that as soon as she was in Europe. However, the best performances in my opinion were those of Adrien Brody - who was excellent as the drug using, alcohol abusing and cynical Kyle Morris - and Brendan Gleeson as Marc Stevenson.

In the end this is a very fine movie about the Yugoslavian civil war. It's too bad that the first part of the movie didn't convince me all that much, because in my opinion

Fmovies: Harrison's Flowers is one of the most remarkably bad films to date. The Balkan Conflict is treated like an unfortunate backdrop for a much more "important" yuppie love story. The film is shameless in this regard, allowing MacDowell to blather through 3/4 of the movie while there's this inconvenient war thingy going on. The makers of this embarrassment should be helicoptered in dropped off in the middle of a civil war after this misguided Lifetime movie.

Also, and I checked her filmography to make sure that I was right, MacDowell's pinnacle performance occurred in Groundhog Day. She has consistently proven her inability to pull off even the simplest of dramatic performances. It is, at times, excruciating to watch her fail. MacDowell has been tolerated because she's easy on the eyes, and, like Julia Roberts, she just seems like a nice person gosh darnit. Hardly reasons to cast her in dramas ever, ever again.

I'm really torn about this one. On one hand, the performances by Andie MacDowell and Adrian Brody are very good, maybe even Oscar quality, and the cinematography is truly excellent, capturing the horror that was Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, the story line is really kind of ridiculous. First, is there ANY mother that would intentionally orphan her children to go to a warzone looking for a likely dead husband? Second, it is VERY unlikely that anyone as naive as she is could make it through to Vodrosnik, regardless of who was helping. Third, the opening scenes in New York/New Jersey are not very watchable, with most of the actors trying too hard. It has a "Lifetime movie" feel to it. Once the film gets to Europe, however, a different sensibility takes over and it becomes riveting cinema, if you can suspend your disbelief of the general concept. Overall, I thought it as a good, but not great movie, certainly worth the price of admission if you can get by the premise. I give it an 8/10.

Harrison's Flowers fmovies. This movie must be seen as a love story more than anything else, and it works as a love story. However, to get an accurate picture of the war between Yugoslavia and Croatia, Harrison's Flowers is not suited. Those familiar with the history of the former Yugoslavia know that war crimes took place in and around Vukovar, and in 1991-92, Serbian nationalist paramilitaries of Arkan were responsible for heinous crimes. However, the movie is very one-sided, and Serbians are presented as half-drunk criminal villains while Croatians get the image of brave freedom fighters. In fact, the vast majority of movies portray Serbians as the villains, but I would claim that Croatians are maybe even more nationalistic than the Serbs. Those who watch the movie should know that Croatians were also responsible for killing civilians, especially during Operation Storm in 1995.

I have gained operational experience myself as a war correspondent, and I know what is like to be under fire from mortars, artillery and snipers. Therefore I was very surprised to see how the reporters and photographers from the movie entered Vukovar wearing military camouflages trying to hide from snipers. I don't know any reporters who would do it like this because it makes you a legitimate target, and I doubt experienced reporters from Newsweek would do it like that. The goal of a journalist in a war area is to be seen. Yes, sometimes you have to avoid checkpoints to get to the other side, but to wear a military uniform is very, very stupid.

Now it has been a couple of days since I wrote my review, and there was another thing that bothered me in this movie. Sarah lands in the city of Graz in Austria making her way all through Croatia to get to Vukovar. If she really wanted to save her husband, it would have been a lot easier to get to Belgrade. From Belgrade there is only a two-hour drive to Vukovar, and the city was controlled by the Serbs at this point. I just spoke to a friend of mine who was an officer in Vukovar, and he said it would have been no problem for the character in the movie to get to Vukovar. Even if there were some paramilitaries present, the Yugoslav army, JNA, was in control.

This movie is simply made for watching on video or DVD. Here's the plan--the first time through, watch all of it. But on subsequent viewings, just watch the stuff that happens in Yugoslavia.

Except for the men's room scene after the Awards Banquet.

This movie is really, really frustrating to watch because you can't help but feel that the directors and other creative parties associated with the actual film were very dedicated to telling the story of the journalists and photographers who were trying to bring the truth of what was happening in the early days of the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia to the screen. They were fascinated by the people who would willingly risk their lives to obtain images of the horrors and atrocities being carried out to the rest of the world, and what motivated them--made them tick. And they were enamoured of the character of Kyle Morris, as portrayed by Adrien Brody, and wished to showcase him in some way in order to drive the point home--that people like him were brave and admirable, no matter what their personal demons and failings.

Unfortunately for those of us who were hooked on this POV, they were also hamstrung, utterly, by the source material, which was a love story about a woman who would not believe her husband was dead, and whose dedication to finding him and whose devotion to him was convincing enough to cause persons such as are described in the preceding paragraph to risk life and limb to try to reunite this couple.

I don't want to use this space to snark. It's unseemly, given the seriousness of the subject matter. What I want to highlight is the way in which one of the performances affected me. The central figure of this movie from a standpoint of character arc is not Harrison, or his wife, Sarah, but Kyle Morris. We first see Kyle at a Pulitzer Awards dinner, where a grief-stricken, coke-addled Kyle Morris goes off on the Harrison Lloyd character. It's a show-stopper, and drenches everything else that happens in Yugoslavia with layers and layers of bitter irony.

The great stuff in this is movie is all about Adrien Brody's character Kyle Morris. This is probably the sort of character that a young actor just dreams of getting his teeth into. Kyle is one of those bundles of contradictions and contrasts that fascinates endlessly. He is an angry, foul-mouthed swaggerer with the gentle hands and soul of a poet, and a kind heart too easily touched. He is a drug user, which is usually portrayed as a character defect which goes along with being weak or afraid to face reality, but in his case, it is probably more a result of his trying to cope with having too MUCH courage and desire to walk into the bowels of real-life hells, like war-torn Yugoslavia. He is both cocksure and certain, and insecure, terrified he will never get recognized for what he is doing in trying to record the truth. He takes rebellious pride in being an outsider, but he churns with jealous resentment against those who seem to have "made it". This character is BRAVE, quick, resourceful, clever, with a crackling energy that suffuses every line, every expression, every move he makes. Brody brings a wild animal's instinctive quickness and 360 degree awareness of the environment to the role; you can almost see his large but sensitive nostrils quiver as he tests the wind for the scent of danger, and the way to safety. If I were going deep into the heart of the battle zone with nothing more than a camera bag and a sense of purpose, I w

I've never seen any other movie like this before! Granted, my exposure to movies where photojournalists are in the midst of war, it gave a stunning portrayal of how these levels of violence affect the people who take the pictures that we see in magazines.

If you want to read about the plot, then you should read the other comments about this film. However, if you want comments, then consider these: While the movie does have a love story plot (wife tries to find husband in war-torn Eastern Europe), the presentation of the war scenes within the movie are phenomenal, giving it a "Saving Private Ryan" feeling.

As Sara (the wife) and the photographers look for Harrison Lloyd, not only do you see how far a wife will go in order to find her husband, but you also witness just how far photojournalists will go in order to save their own.

And if you ask me, the "Hollywood Ending" was absolutely necessary in order to justify showing the rest of the grim war scenes throughout the movie (they can be disturbing, but they aren't gory). Had the movie ended any other way, I think that the majority of the viewers would feel extremely depressed after sitting through a two-hour movie.

Definitely a great movie! This is one that will get a lot of playtime in my DVD player.