Harrison's Flowers

I doubt very many will ever get to see Harrison's flowers. This is really the most misleadingly titled movie i can recall. The title and the fact that it stars Andie MacDowell reaks cuddly romantic girl movie. Nothing could be farther from the truth !

Instead this movie turns out to be one of the better warmovies i've seen in recent years.

The story is actually similar to that of "saving private ryan" and it's portrayal of war as griping and realistic. Only this time we're not put into the shoes of soldiers storming up a bulletsprayed beach but in the shoes of the civilians that cover the wars: the photojournalists. And the heroics is not killing the enemy but simply to bring the world a glimpse of what goes on inside a the chaotic inferno that is a warzone.

Andie MacDowell plays Sarah Lloyd a suberban mother of two and voted "most unlikely to be found inside a warzone" in her highschool yearbook. When her husband "Harrison" (a roughneck newsweek warphotographer) goes missing in wartorn Croatia 1991. She basicly picks up a camera herself and goes over there to find him. Rather unbelievable but it works well to set up the real story.

I just saw "Welcome to Sarajevo", a film that got a lot of press and positive remarks when it came out. I only suspect that much of the press was based on the fact that it came out only a couple of years after the end of that terrible war in Bosnia.

Just as in "Welcome" this film also depicts the life of journalists, trying to understand and convey the happenings in a country once believed to be almost western. (Which, I suspect, is the reason that it had such an impact on the western psyche.) As everbody else has pointed out this is where the best characters are found, especially Adrian Brodys character.

Several others have already pointed out that the main story revolving around a lost love and an heroic wife trying to save her husband is really awkward. But since you need somekind of story, that might just as well be it. I saw this film a second time just recently and actually managed to ignore the plot and focuse on the description of the madness that was eastern Croatia in the early 1990´s.

This film has an incredible feeling, the settings, the photography and the score makes it come really close to being in an actual war. I cant really praise this enough. Compared to "Welcome" this film hits you in the guts as it shows the brutality of urban warfare and the senseless killings that occur in all wars.

Other films about Bosnia that are recommended if you like this one, "No mans land", "Pretty Village, Pretty fire" and "Savior". And why not give "Welcome" a chance too.

Harrison's Flowers is a journey into a journalist's personal hell. While some may feel that the premise of the story is rather lame and confabulated, it serves a purpose. To show the human side of the photo journalists who bring the horrors of the world to those of us who, as they noted in the movie, are just worried about getting a parking ticket.

Too often when we non-journalists see photos of war zones we are horrified and, at the same time, we are dumbfounded as to how someone could be so inhuman and unfeeling as to photograph such graphic examples of man's inhumanity to man. Harrison's Flowers is excellent at showing us that just as a reader we can't stop looking at the horror even though we are revolted, the journalist cannot stop photographing and documenting it even though the human side of them is revolted as well.

As for Andie MacDowell's so-called wooden performance, one must remember that in this film she is seeing her husband's and his colleagues' world through their eyes for the first time. How quickly would any of us be able to break out of our shock-like trance and be totally outraged or emotional if this were the first time we were seeing it? Even the veteran photo journalist portrayed by Brendan Gleeson was paralyzed with shock more than once in the film. Andie MacDowell's character came from such an insulated world that seemingly emotionless shock was the perfect way to portray Sarah, who simply cannot fathom what she sees unfolding around her.

Harrison's Flowers is an excellent portrayal of the Serbo-Croatian hell that descended upon that part of Europe and irreparably tore apart the life of anyone in its path.

An emotional film about a woman's search for her husband, shown through events that really happened in the Croatian city of Vukovar.

The city of Vukovar was destroyed by the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army) and Serb paramilitaries. Unfortunately, that really happened in 1991, and the hospital we see in the film really does exist, Serb paramilitaries pulled wounded Croatian civilians and soldiers out of it and killed most of them.

The massacre occurred shortly after Vukovar's capture by the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army ) and paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. In that period, it was the fiercest battle in Europe since 1945, and Vukovar was the first major European city completely destroyed since World War II.

The film is really hard to watch, because the atrocities we see in the film, committed by Serbian paramilitaries and the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army), really happened in 1991.

The cast evoked the emotions and all the horrors of the war, the film is emotional, especially for those who survived the war.

The footage showing Serb paramilitaries entering the city and singing a truly disgusting song is faithfully reconstructed in the film and when you look at the actual footage from 1991, it is almost identical.

The cinematography is realistic and the directing is excellent. An emotional and impressive film.

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 would want no one else to take me there. When he wraps his arm around Sarah, and tells her to move, she obeys. I would, too. He seems to be tapped in to the undercurrents that flow beneath the reality that they see and hear around them, and sense shifts in the flow and direction that the others cannot, and acts on a combination of instinct and intelligence to get Sarah into a city which has become a charnel house where no badge or profession is respected or spared from the snipers and the bayonets.

I was fascinated by this character. It was the sort of portrayal that made one want to know more--what drives someone like that? What was his childhood like? Why did he risk all for someone like Sarah?

Unfortunately, this portrayal and character threw the whole film off-balance, and made the putative heroine seem self-absorbed and unlikable in the end.

I recommend this movie for the brilliant footage of the journalists and Sarah working their way through war-torn Yugoslavia, for the harrowing urban combat scenes, and for Brody's performance.

I can't, however, give it more than 8 stars, since it committed the primary infraction of rendering its heroine unlikable in certain ways, without redemption or the change brought about by a true character arc.

Also, Harrison and Sarah's son was sort of creepy. Sorry, but there it is.