Review: Wilted plot ruins ‘Flowers’

Geoff Carter

Friday, March 15, 2002 | 9:37 a.m.

Harrison's Flowers

Grade: * 1/2

Starring: Andie MacDowell, David Strathairn, Adrien Brody and Elias Koteas.

Screenplay: Elie Chouraqui.

Director: Elie Chouraqui.

Rated: R for strong war violence and gruesome images, pervasive language and brief drug use.

Running time: 130 minutes.

For movie times see: http://www.vegas.com/movies/

Andie MacDowell is the center of "Harrison's Flowers," which is unfortunate. I have yet to discover a film in which I've liked her. She hides behind her cheekbones, and has two emotional states: pouty and waterworks. She uses both in this film, and you really have to force yourself to focus on her, similar to staring at a flower while bombs explode behind it.

As it turns out, that's not a metaphor. "Flowers" tells the story of a fictional Newsweek photojournalist, Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn), who is sent to Yugoslavia to cover the country's "civil war." Predictably, he vanishes and is thought dead, which compels his wife, Sarah (MacDowell), to grab a couple of maps and go into the most dangerous place on Earth to find him.

"Harrison's Flowers" gives verisimilitude a bad name. It's true that dozens of photojournalists are abducted or killed every year, but the very idea of a journalist's spouse heading into a war zone to find one, dead or alive, is beyond ludicrous. What of her two children? Did she even bother to call the State Department with her suspicions? Didn't any member of her family care enough to throw a net over her?

To writer/director Elie Chouraqui's credit, he knows exactly how to treat Sarah's hubris. MacDowell makes it into the country, naive in her belief that she might drive right through enemy lines -- then she turns a corner, her car is shot up, and she is nearly raped.

So much for that drive in the country.

Luckily, she falls in with colleagues of Harrison's -- the burly Irishman Stevenson (Brendan Gleeson), the hotheaded Kyle (Adrien Brody), and a recent Pulitzer winner, Yeager (Elias Koteas). They do most of the talking for the rest of the film as they drape a camera around Sarah's neck, stop to shoot scenes of brutality, and drive her straight into the war zone, defying even their own logic.

Chouraqui pours on the violence and horror as if it were nothing. He seems intent to share the real-life horrors witnessed by combat photographers, and lingers on every pile of bodies, fatal gunshot and traumatized child. He actually shows a young girl alive and smiling one minute, dead and violated the next. (A character exclaims, "They raped her!" to labor the point.)

All of this might be palatable if the film were about the war in Yugoslavia, or even about the trials faced by photojournalists. But it's about a wife's quest to retrieve her (possibly dead) husband, which was the wrong peg on which to hang the film. Every time MacDowell appeared on screen, puffy and crying, I wondered why she didn't just go home to tend to her living family, and quit drawing Harrison's friends into greater danger.

Every time I answered my own question: She can't quit. It's a movie.

The website for "Harrison's Flowers" shamelessly plays upon the plight of executed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. I wonder what Pearl's widow Mariane, who sensibly tried to use diplomacy to recover her husband, thinks of being co-opted by this poor fantasy. By staying home and caring for her unborn child, she's three times the hero Sarah Lloyd could ever hope to be.