Several decades ago now, there was a much publicized case, where a press photographer, well-known for his ruthlessness, while covering a disaster, came across a middle-aged woman trapped under debris at the bottom of some steps to a downstairs bar. As the woman cried for assistance, it is alleged that he threw several two by fours on her, at artistic angles, and fired off a roll of pictures with his Leica.

This act, even in the Community of Professional Photographers, was thought to have been a bit much.

But that was a long time ago, before civil wars, police actions, military arrest invasions, terrorism and wars on terrorism became flavors of the journalistic month. Armies of media people now enplane to anywhere but home, many of them apparently looking for legless children, raped women, massacred prisoners, and general desolation -- "in order to bring the story to the World."

[Professional News Photographers make the telling point that their editors often scrap graphically violent and candid domestic disaster pictures (e.g., 911 bodies), which if taken of subjects overseas, would get printed. This practice seems universal to modern journalism, as true in Europe or wherever as it is here.]

I could not help recalling the once infamous incident as I watched Elie Chouraqui's HARRISON'S FLOWERS, an expose/love triumphant movie, set in the time of the Serbo-Croat Civil War of 1991. The production is in three parts: A sentimental but chill beginning and a reassuring conclusion in Manhattan and Long Island, joined by a frenetic, brutal expedition to the Balkans. Based on a novel by Isabel Ellsen, herself a still photographer, written with her assistance by Chouraqui (MAN ON FIRE, 1987) and two virtual novices, the film, well received in initial press reviews, has for me the smoky odor of panic and opportunism about it.

Consider the fact that, despite several awards from the San Sabastian Film Festival, though shot in 2000, HARRISON'S FLOWERS was not released in much of Europe until late last year, and only now, March 2002, in the United States. (Half the actors have made four or five films since then, some of them released before this one.) Might HARRISON'S FLOWERS have been held up by 911? Or, conversely, might that tragedy, and the subsequent multi-pincer War on Terrorism, have stimulated interest in this two year-old movie among the distributors?

Hard to say.

The movie certainly has a few coincidental similarities with the vicious murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Pearl.

I had hopes for HARRISON'S FLOWERS. We need successful films which probe the geopolitical mysteries of these horrible acts, for they increasingly bear upon our individual lives, spreading like a polluted ocean around the World, and inevitably into the white picket-fenced yards of oblivious Mr. and Mrs. America. I was mildly disappointed with THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (2001), but compared to the HARRISON'S FLOWERS fuzzy story of the 1991 Yugoslavian Civil War, John Boorman's analysis of the aftermath of George H. W. Bush's bloody pre-Christmas 1989 arrest of Panamanian strongman, Manuel Noriega, was a brilliant artistic exposition.

The basic dozen year-old story of HARRISON'S FLOWERS is a simple one.

In the Spring of 1991, crack Newsweek photographer Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn) has returned to his beloved greenhouse flowers on Long Island. He longs to abandon the absences and increasing dangers of "The Big Story" in far climes, to be with his wife Sarah (Andie MacDowell), son Cesar (Scott Anton) and daughter Margaux (Quinn Shephard).

Ah, but the fate which animates many a Hollywood movie, strikes this French produced one. Harrison is asked to award a Pulitzer Prize to his colleague and competitor, Yeager (Elias Koteas). The sight of the two of them on stage enrages a wiry cokehead photographer known as Kyle (Adrien Brody), who confronts Harrison and attacks Yeager in the men's room (between the lines, as it were). In explanation, Kyle spits out his contempt for celebrity journalists who play it safe covering PR events in settled areas of the earth.

[It is usually a bad sign when most of the characters in a movie have just one name.]

Kyle more or less challenges the pair to take some chances, far from Hilton rooftop bars, in the dangerous little hotspots of the Earth.

Harrison, estranged from his shy, embittered son, has told his boss, Newsweek Editor Sam Brubeck (Alun Armstrong), that he wants to stay home from now on. Sarah is happy, but when Brubeck pleads with Harrison for "one more, just one more" -- a little civil war in Croatia -- Harrison, perhaps knowing that Yeager is going, perhaps nettled by Kyle's criticism . . . says, okay.

A month later, Lloyd disappears, and is presumed killed, in the collapse of a house near Vukovar, Croatia, a key objective in the Civil War. The film up to this point, though somewhat dull and unfocused, has been fairly sure-footed. However, the scene where Sarah, a photo editor at Newsweek, enters her busy office complex, facing guilty glances, minor double takes and thousand yard stares, left me incredulous. It is capped by Sarah's badly staged collapse, when she receives the bad news.

I never really believed in HARRISON'S FLOWERS from that point.

Time passes. Sarah refuses to accept Harrison's death. Mom (Diane Baker?) arrives, to take care of the kids on the Lloyds' spacious country spread. When Sarah breaks up the reading of the kaddish for Harrison, Mom tries to "talk some sense" to her daughter, mother of her grandchildren. Sarah, quite understandably, is unwilling to let go and move on, as most of those around her hope she will.

Then, one day, doing her job, sifting through hundreds of photos (looking for one Newsweek can use), Sarah sees a shape in a crowd, in a shot taken near Vukovar. She is convinced that it is Harrison.

In short order, she is zipping in a little car across the truly splendid summer countryside of Croatia (though it is actually Slovakia in the movie). She picks up a Croatian young man who offers to be a guide in reaching Vukovar. In this sequence, the feel of driving through an unfamiliar countryside is nicely caught.

CRASH- KARRUMP!

They are suddenly in the middle of a fire fight. Sarah and the young man park and take cover. A tank turns her car into a flattened tin can. The pair are field-interrogated by Serbian paramilitaries.

Flustered, the young man hesitates about his nationality.

CRACK.

He is shot in the forehead, sliding with a bloody smear down the side of a truck.

A couple of the soldiers seize Sarah. She is about to be raped, but the War fortuitously intrudes. As it is, she is left with a vicious gouge to the left of her nose, just above her mouth.

Sara goes on the run, hides where she can, and looks terribly lost, when who should turn up but Kyle and his beefy photographer colleague, Stevenson (Brendan Gleeson). Besides cocaine, Kyle has added Speed and Phenobarbital to his drug chest, which he is always willing to share. Despite misgivings, these tough professionals pledge to help Sarah reach Vukovar, on the chance that her husband, reported a casualty in this chaos six weeks earlier, may be alive.

From here out, tied to what others have pointed out as a Wizard of Oz scenario, we are treated to the new standard Spielberg trademarked war sequences: tracking cameras, rapid cuts, falling bodies, explosions. All the carnage is lovingly depicted, but the absurdity of our heroes, as they are presented, is ignored.

We have, Sarah, a 30-something mother of two, who presumably has spent most of her adult life at a light table, or pouring cereal for her children. She runs, she jumps, she crawls through mud, but her hair appears always freshly washed and combed out. Those remarkably full MacDowell lips are never less than perfect, enhanced with stylish frosted lip stick, and subtly outlined.

[One touch which impressed me is that Sarah's facial wound gradually scabs over, grows progressively smaller, but in the last scene of HARRISON'S FLOWERS weeks later, it is still there, as a scar. (Credit Jiri Farkas, who did the make-up on Vilsmaier's STALINGRAD, 1993.) Excellent.]

Then, we have a cynical, emaciated, strung out Kyle (the best performance in the movie). He is constantly remarking that one of them is going to be killed in this crazy crusade, but he goes on, fueled by everything but lighter fluid.

We have the beer-drinking Gleeson, his cameras always clicking, obsessed by almost pornographic shots of grotesque corpses -- or raped, mutilated girls. He also runs, jumps and stumbles for miles with the other two; but if we met this Irishman in a bar, we would know that he is a candidate for a heart attack. He would have a hard time running to the W.C., far less across shell-torn Croatia.

These three are like nasty poster children, suggesting an explanation why so many of the wretched of the Earth hate Westerners in general, Americans in particular. Dashing from place to place shouting out their credentials, poking their camera lenses into the faces of withered, grieving women, Kyle and Gleeson appear feckless. Sarah, rushing through a hospital, shouting Harrison's name, comes across as insensitive. In the midst of scenes of terrible carnage, watching the trio's monomaniacal quest, the question may come to the viewer: "Who made gods of Americans?"

An extention of that question to TV news services, increasingly politicized and without objectivity, may also help explain why, as the film points out, 48 photographers were killed during the War.

Of course, each of trio -- and the peripatetic, star photographer Yeager, who turns up again late in the film -- intones some variation of, "It's dirty work, but we must reveal what's going on in this place to the rest of the World!" In the film, however, little of what they record appears to transcend a pornography of violence.

Perhaps, no film could logically untangle the internecine strands of the Serbo-Croat Civil War. The Macedoneans, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British, the French, the Nazis, the Russians, 17 ethnic groups, half a dozen religions, several Crusades, decades of experience with clandestine societies and secret police, and at least three major wars in modern times contribute certain reasons why governments and news agencies cock their ears when "unrest breaks out" in the Balkans.

The Serbo-Croat War of 1991, one of several such civil wars still smoldering there to this day, has its direct, recent roots in the fact that the Croats basically supported Hitler and the Serbs Stalin in World War II. Tito, a Croat, became a leader of the Serbs, and held a loose federation of five nations together under the rubric of Yugoslavia for twenty-five years, until his death in 1980. Following ten unsettled years, the Serbs and the Croats, further divided by religion, fell upon each other. Bolstered by two First Class modern armies, while we and the Europeans watched acutely (taking notes), they fought each other until exhausted; and then, in time, they turned upon their Muslim minorities.

For vengeance, for property, for religion, for pride . . . .

All HARRISON'S FLOWERS has to say about this complexity is, "Croats good; Serbs bad."

When Adrien Brody stepped before our preview audience in San Francisco, I anticipated some further insight into the motivations of HARRISON'S FLOWERS. He was rather tall, dressed in a watch cap and tattered field jacket, with that wonderful face like a battered eagle's. Alas, his remarks were along the lines of, "Listen up, folks, this movie was an awesome experience."

At bottom, the problem of the film is that we never care enough about the experience of Harrison and Sarah. Andie MacDowell is the competent, loyal, modern wife and mother. David Strathairn, a taller version of Brody, with an expressive voice and eyes, does not have enough to do, and what he does have is not effectively presented. He is in the film only at the beginning and the end. Thus, the relationship between the husband and the wife is not "awesome" enough.

I still remember, many years ago, when Tito was still in power, going by train from the Yugoslav Capital, Belgrade, in eastern Serbia near the Rumanian border, to the beautiful Medieval Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic. I thought then, and I think now, I have never been through a more beautiful country, nor have I interacted with a more civilized, charming, strong people. When the Serbs shelled Dubrovnik from the sea in the 1990's, it shattered my faith that Mankind had learned anything from World War II. Or that the future would be really promising.

If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.

HARRISON'S FLOWERS, which might have been moving and informative, seems long at 130 minutes.

Photography: Nicola Pecorini (First job as DP).

Music: Cliff Eidelman (Pillsbury, FREE WILLY 3, 1997).

---------------

Those interested in a first rate photographer, who seems to have some heart and a conscience, might want to look at the work of Sebastiao Salgado, who documents the victims of Globalization, which HARRISON'S FLOWERS should really be about. He, too, has been accused "sentimental voyeurism," but at least most of his subjects are alive.

Check out this URL --

www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/

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UPDATE (4/29/03): Stimulated by the wasp's comment, I read this review of HARRISON'S FLOWERS again, after many months. It seems even more accurate today than when I wrote it. We now have highly popular "embedded correspondents," in forward military units, who seem more ready to identify with the cause, to see themselves as combatants. (We can imagine the jokes around the Pentagon water coolers over the cleverness of that term: "embedded.") And we have corporate and nationlistic news consortiums using methods and "party lines" we would have condemned if Paul Goebbels or Pravda had used them.

The percentage of news people killed in Iraq rose.

Good to note, however, in passing, that Adrien Brody got a better part in THE PIANIST, directed by Roman Polanski, who had seen in Eastern Europe something of what he re-created there.

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Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age