Harrison’s Flowers
dir. Chouraqui
Opens Fri March 15
Various
A successful horror film demands a particular relationship between the audience and main character. To create an uneasy tension, the viewer must empathize with the protagonist, but at the same time, find them to be a completely frustrating bonehead. Get out of the woods! Don’t go in the cellar! What are you thinking? Run!
Although intended as a war correspondent film, Harrison’s Flowers only works because it follows this format. It is 1991, and Newsweek sends Harrison (David Strathairn), a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, into what the editors believe is a low-key ethnic skirmish in Yugoslavia. Within a week, Harrison has vanished, allegedly dead when a bombed building collapses. But his wife, the irrepressible Andie MacDowell, is unwilling to believe the news; she flies to Europe, rents a car and drives across the border into the heart of a war.
Like nearly every war correspondent film, Harrison’s Flowers tells about the search for a lost comrade. The gold standard for these films is The Killing Fields, a (mostly) true-life story about a New York Times photojournalist who journeys into Cambodia, where he discovers thousands of sun-bleached skeletons and the leftover horrors of the Khmer Rogue. The effectiveness of The Killing Fields is based directly on the distance that the journalist moves from objective observer to an emotionally engaged participant.
But Harrison’s Flowers does not have the true craftiness of a war correspondent film. MacDowell starts as an overwrought suburban wife who turns into a hardened survivalist. Like the heroines in Halloween and Alien, she learns to outsmart her enemy. And, like those heroines, she flies in the face of reason. No, don’t leave the DMZ. Don’t go down Sniper Alley. Run!
Harrison’s Flowers may be the first Hollywood film about the murky Bosnian war that will connect with a wide audience. Unlike the complexities and subtleties of Bosnia, the film is crude and simple. MacDowell’s true journey is to save her husband. It is an easy relationship: We don’t have to understand the war; we just need to want Andie MacDowell to outsmart monstrous snipers and run into the arms of her hubby.