A Journalist’s View of War
The mortality rate among journalists is high. 135 photographers from around the world were killed or disappeared while covering wars in Vietnam and Indochina. The International Federation of Journalists reports a total of 91 journalists killed in 2001, and at least eight have been killed in Afghanistan.
This is the premise upon which Harrison’s Flowers is based. The film is a love story set against the backdrop of the 1991 war in the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, the filmmakers fail to deliver on the premise.
The film opens with Pulitzer prize-winning Newsweek photojournalist Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn) returning home from an assignment in Africa. In the opening few minutes Harrison appears rough-housing with his two children, is captivated by a television news report from Africa, tends flowers in his greenhouse, and presents an award to colleague Yeager Pollack (Elias Koteas) at a Pulitzer awards ceremony.
Yet, Harrison is not content. He’s dissatisfied with his distant relationship with his son Cesar (Scott Anton) and he tells his editor, Samuel Brubeck (Alun Armstrong), that he’s giving it up. “I never used to get clammy hands, and I wasn’t afraid of anything. All I can think about now is Sarah and the kids.” At the request of Brubeck, Harrison agrees to stay on a while longer.
At the awards ceremony, a bitter, foul-mouthed, drug-using Kyle Morris (Adrien Brody) confronts Harrison in the men’s room. Morris explains that his colleague, “a tiny little photographer in a tiny little country with a tiny little war” was recently killed overseas while “you are giving each other awards.”
When a conflict breaks out in Yugoslavia, Brubeck asks Harrison to go for what is to be a one-week assignment, introducing the viewer to a war we never fully understood and that we would rather forget. The film taps into that when, while watching the first footage from Yugoslavia, the newsroom staff misunderstands the conflict. “It’s just an ethnic skirmish,” Brubeck remarks.
A Wife on a Mission
Brubeck later informs Harrison’s wife, Sarah (Andie MacDowell), that he has apparently been killed when a home he was in collapsed. “We were wrong,” he admits. “It’s not just skirmishes. It’s a filthy war. We were all wrong.”
Sarah, however, refuses to believe her husband is dead. “Something would have broken inside if he were dead,” she tells her brother. Becoming self-absorbed, and ignoring her children, she sets up camp, living and sleeping in front of two television sets hoping for help from the footage. It is there, during a news report, that she thinks she sees Harrison among a group of refugees headed toward Vukovar.
Leaving the children in the care of her mother, she heads to the war-torn country, picking up a Croatian hitchhiker heading home to his wife and child on the way. Shortly after they cross the border, she receives a brutal introduction to war. Their car is shelled, the Croatian student is killed, and Sarah is nearly raped by a band of Serbian rebels. Here the focus of the story shifts to an action film, with Sarah saying little.
The film makes it virtually impossible to distinguish between one side or another in the conflict, suggesting there is little difference between the two. After being rescued by a TV crew, she is introduced to Morris. He tells her, “You can’t stay in this country. No one knows what this country is…Serbian, Catholic, Croatian, Orthodox… there’s no bad guys, there’s no good guys. They’ll shoot you first and think about it later. This is no place for the living.” In doing so, the film attempts not to take sides. Yet, the gruesome atrocities which are apparent at their every turn makes everyone in the film seem like a “bad guy.”
Sarah will not take “no” for an answer. This sets up a series of narrow escapes as Morris, Sarah, and Marc Stevenson (Brendan Gleeson) make their way toward Vukovar, where the fighting is fiercest. At one point with tanks rolling toward their car and shells flying, even the optimist Morris admits, “We’re dead.” In the next scene they’re shown driving the car, with never any indication of how they made it out. Such scenes make the film seem both unrealistic and unbelievable.
At their final checkpoint, they meet up with Pollack who has come to try to change Sarah’s mind. Morris tells him, “You’re not going to change her mind. All you can do is help her. We better both pray that we find someone that loves us the way she loves him.” The filmmaker also uses Koteas, somewhat awkwardly, to narrate the last third of the film.
In yet another unrealistic scene, the four don camouflage to hide from and outrun Serbian snipers. When they finally reach Vukovar, Pollack explains, “It wasn’t fighting that was going on, but extermination.” While everyone around them is being massacred, the journalists wave their cameras like passports, and endure one casualty as they make their way to the hospital.
Lots of Death, Little Depth
The film contains some minor spiritual overtones. It is clear that the Lloyd family is Jewish. After Harrison’s disappearance, Sarah interrupts the rabbi in the midst of a memorial service being held in her home, to tell her family, “He’s not dead.” Sarah is not without faith, yet she is never shown relying upon that faith during her search for her husband. At another point in the film, as the journalists come across a dying mumbling woman, one of the photographers asks what she is saying. It is Sarah that recognizes that the dying woman is praying. A painting of Christ sits upon the floor behind her.
The film is one of contrasts. On one hand we are treated to the atrocities of a civil war. Yet, amidst it all is a woman who will seemingly stop at nothing for her husband. Unfortunately, it’s less than convincing.
The film tries too quickly to establish a loving relationship between Harrison and Sarah. In the only way that Hollywood seems capable of portraying intimacy, Harrison and Sarah make love. However, in the absence of any real communication, the attempt is unsuccessful. In addition, the viewer fails to truly identify with any of the film's key characters. Lacking that, it is later difficult to become emotionally vested in Sarah’s overriding passion in her search for her husband, or Morris’ desire to take up her cause.
Had the film spent more time up front developing the characters and establishing a truly intimate (emotionally and intellectually, not just physically) relationship between Harrison and Sarah, the rest of the film might have been more believable.
Pervasive profanity distracts from the film’s dialogue. It’s as if the journalists, faced by the chaos of war, know how to do little else but swear. The film is definitely for mature viewers only.
Co-written by French director Elie Chouraqui and photojournalist Isabel Ellsen, the film accurately captures the realities and dangers of photojournalism. At one point, as the photographers are holed up in a basement during a battle, Morris remarks that, “They know that our photos are going to tell the story of this war. They want us to take them. No one else will.” The film is dedicated to the 48 journalists that were killed in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995
The film also captures the chaos and the gruesome senselessness of war. Fortunately, unlike the real-life Daniel Pearl story, this one has a happier ending.
Tim Drake is the managing editor of Catholic.net and author of There We Stood, Here We Stand: 11 Lutherans Rediscover their Catholic Roots. He can be reached at timd@astound.net.
* * *
2002, Universal Focus.
MPAA: R – Restricted
US Conference of Catholic Bishops: A-IV, Adults with Reservations
Pervasive and harrowing war violence with gruesome images, some drug use and recurring rough language.
Should you go? Not recommended.
