Wilting Flowers

"Sometimes love is the only proof you need," reads the tagline for Harrison's Flowers, cinema's newest offering to the sacrificial altar of abominable love-and-war epics. The film tries to bring life to large-scale calamity (the war-torn former Yugoslavia) via identification with a small group of individuals, ^ la Titanic and Saving Private Ryan--and this time those individuals are more two-dimensionally gallant and white-bread America than usual.

The story is saccharine: In November 1991 Harrison Lloyd (David Straithairn), a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, is sent to Yugoslavia to cover some provincial skirmish and promises to be home for his son's birthday in a week. We then get the obligatory close-up of his faithful wife Sarah (Andie MacDowell), pursing her lips and wilting inside because Harrison's never home anymore. In a matter of days, he is reported missing and presumed dead. But no body, no death, right? Sarah knows he's not dead--if he were, she would feel it in her heart. So, of course, as any of us would, she flies to Yugoslavia, leaving their two children (who are always mopey-eyed with neglect but desperately cheerful) with family. What would then be a profound treatise on the horror of war and genocide becomes merely the condescension of a "civilized" perspective on the gravity of this conflict.

Adrien Brody gives an excellent performance as Kyle, a photographer whose waning idealism still admits a heartbreaking empathy for humanity. His is the only noteworthy acting, though--MacDowell peppers her signature woodenness with some bouts of hyperbolic emoting, and Straithairn's character isn't realistic enough to do anything but shuffle around confusedly, trying to appear earnest and heroic. This subject deserves respect and commemoration but languishes in a puerile film that, despite its promotional promises, refuses to delve into the heart of things.