HARRISON'S FLOWERS, a film title that goes nowhere in explaining what this movie is all about, is perhaps an apt title for the aimless storytelling technique that takes up the first forty-five minutes of story exposition. It gives no clue as to what we are about to witness once the heroine decides to trace the whereabouts of her journalist husband in war-torn Yugoslavia, circa 1991.
The idea that a loving wife would put herself and everyone else around her in constant danger in the midst of a savage civil war raging all around them, in order to reach the side of the husband everyone tells her is dead, is even more ludicrous on film than it is in the pages of a script. Nor is it helped by the disturbing performance of Andie MacDowell who puts herself in the kind of situations that would turn a normal person into a basket case, but plods on determined to find the missing husband.
To make matters worse, her missing hubby is played by David Straithairn, an actor with all the charisma of a wet mop, who has been neglecting his wife and children due to the pressures of his job as a photojournalist for Newsweek. His wife seems oblivious to the danger she heads for, even after a traveling companion is abruptly shot in the head by Croatian soldiers. A more compelling actor cast as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist might have made MacDowell's mission more credible.
Given short shrift are actors in the supporting cast, with the exception of Adrien Brody as a scruffy looking coke-sniffing hipster who is so sorry that he dissed her husband at a social event that he is willing to make up for it by escorting her through battle zones. He uses the "f" word as an expletive every time he utters a thought. At one point, asked to explain his actions, he says cynically: "I always wanted to be a boy scout." But short shrift is indeed the fate of Diane Baker as MacDowell's mother and Gerard Butler in a brief supporting role that has no function at all in the plot. No wonder Butler, who had only a few good supporting roles before his stint as PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, was so little known to most film fans.
The war zone scenes are gripping and powerfully filmed, but the slim love story that holds all the threads together is a weak one and most of the scenes leading up to the street battles are so poorly paced that tedium sets in and never quite lets up.
All of it is handsomely photographed but it seems like so much care was wasted on a story that limps to a less than satisfying conclusion.
The idea that a loving wife would put herself and everyone else around her in constant danger in the midst of a savage civil war raging all around them, in order to reach the side of the husband everyone tells her is dead, is even more ludicrous on film than it is in the pages of a script. Nor is it helped by the disturbing performance of Andie MacDowell who puts herself in the kind of situations that would turn a normal person into a basket case, but plods on determined to find the missing husband.
To make matters worse, her missing hubby is played by David Straithairn, an actor with all the charisma of a wet mop, who has been neglecting his wife and children due to the pressures of his job as a photojournalist for Newsweek. His wife seems oblivious to the danger she heads for, even after a traveling companion is abruptly shot in the head by Croatian soldiers. A more compelling actor cast as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist might have made MacDowell's mission more credible.
Given short shrift are actors in the supporting cast, with the exception of Adrien Brody as a scruffy looking coke-sniffing hipster who is so sorry that he dissed her husband at a social event that he is willing to make up for it by escorting her through battle zones. He uses the "f" word as an expletive every time he utters a thought. At one point, asked to explain his actions, he says cynically: "I always wanted to be a boy scout." But short shrift is indeed the fate of Diane Baker as MacDowell's mother and Gerard Butler in a brief supporting role that has no function at all in the plot. No wonder Butler, who had only a few good supporting roles before his stint as PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, was so little known to most film fans.
The war zone scenes are gripping and powerfully filmed, but the slim love story that holds all the threads together is a weak one and most of the scenes leading up to the street battles are so poorly paced that tedium sets in and never quite lets up.
All of it is handsomely photographed but it seems like so much care was wasted on a story that limps to a less than satisfying conclusion.