Harrison's Flowers

I don't know what it is that made me decide to give this movie a try. All I knew was that this was some kind of war movie from an unknown French director, with Andie MacDowell - not exactly my most favorite actress - and Adrien Brody - who was excellent in "The Pianist", but who I didn't see play in any other movie since. Those aren't exactly strong reasons why I shouldn't miss it and yet I was willing to give it a try, probably because I hoped to be surprised by it. And that's exactly what it did.

Harrison Lloyd is a photojournalist who has already won a Pulitzer price with his photographs of several wars. But he now has a wife and two children and he doesn't want to go to another war-zone anymore, because he is afraid that he might die while doing his job. He wants to change jobs, but his boss has given him one last assignment. He'll have to travel to ex-Yugoslavia, where the civil war has just started. What appears to be a small incident at first, quickly proves to be one of the most gruesome wars in recent history and it doesn't take long before Harrison is missing, presumably dead. But his wife Sarah refuses to believe that he's no longer alive and decides to go after him and to look for him. As she penetrates deeper into the war zone, she is confronted with all the horrors that were committed in this war: random executions of soldiers and civilians, rape, snipers, the uncertainty of where and who the enemy is,...

At first I must say that I didn't like this movie all too much. This seemed to be like yet another Hollywood product about a perfect and happy family who is all a sudden thorn apart by some unfortunate event, who learns to deal with the pain, building up a new life without the missing person and so on, and so on. Nothing new, nothing special. But then it all started to change... a lot. As soon as she is in ex-Yugoslavia, being confronted with all the horrors of that civil war, it was as if I was struck by lightening. Never have I seen so much realistic images in a movie about this war. This started to feel more like a documentary, rather than like a movie. It was all so incredibly realistic and I can't say that they have left anything out. Young children murdered and raped; soldiers and civilians, man and woman, old and young,... executed in front of your eyes; all the explosions and the attacks;... It seems like you're all witnessing it live, as if you are seeing it through the eyes and the lenses of the photojournalists yourself. It was incredible...

The performances in this movie are more than OK and Andie MacDowell was a pleasant surprise in this one, although I must say that I liked her performance a lot more once she was the journalist in ex-Yugoslavia. Before that I sometimes found her acting a bit too much and quite unrealistic (take for instance the several scenes in which she is constantly falling when she hears bad news). I didn't really have the feeling that the wife of a war photographer, who constantly lives with this kind of uncertainty, would act and react the way she did. But as I said before, I forgot about that as soon as she was in Europe. However, the best performances in my opinion were those of Adrien Brody - who was excellent as the drug using, alcohol abusing and cynical Kyle Morris - and Brendan Gleeson as Marc Stevenson.

In the end this is a very fine movie about the Yugoslavian civil war. It's too bad that the first part of the movie didn't convince me all that much, because in my opinion it wasn't all that strong, but overall I really liked what I saw. That's why I give this movie a well-deserved 7.5/10.

I doubt very many will ever get to see Harrison's flowers. This is really the most misleadingly titled movie i can recall. The title and the fact that it stars Andie MacDowell reaks cuddly romantic girl movie. Nothing could be farther from the truth !

Instead this movie turns out to be one of the better warmovies i've seen in recent years.

The story is actually similar to that of "saving private ryan" and it's portrayal of war as griping and realistic. Only this time we're not put into the shoes of soldiers storming up a bulletsprayed beach but in the shoes of the civilians that cover the wars: the photojournalists. And the heroics is not killing the enemy but simply to bring the world a glimpse of what goes on inside a the chaotic inferno that is a warzone.

Andie MacDowell plays Sarah Lloyd a suberban mother of two and voted "most unlikely to be found inside a warzone" in her highschool yearbook. When her husband "Harrison" (a roughneck newsweek warphotographer) goes missing in wartorn Croatia 1991. She basicly picks up a camera herself and goes over there to find him. Rather unbelievable but it works well to set up the real story.

Outstanding war drama. Grim, realistic - and what a fantastic cast. I have no idea why this film isn't more widely known - it certainly deserves to be - or actually, I do have an idea why it tanked. The cheesy title plus the fact that Andie MacDowell - the (then) "rom-com queen" - is in it, and that the film received next to no marketing are very likely reasons why nobody went to see this. But YOU should. It's worth it. 8 stars out of 10.

In case you're interested in more underrated masterpieces, here's some of my favorites:

imdb.com/list/ls070242495

Harrison's Flowers is a journey into a journalist's personal hell. While some may feel that the premise of the story is rather lame and confabulated, it serves a purpose. To show the human side of the photo journalists who bring the horrors of the world to those of us who, as they noted in the movie, are just worried about getting a parking ticket.

Too often when we non-journalists see photos of war zones we are horrified and, at the same time, we are dumbfounded as to how someone could be so inhuman and unfeeling as to photograph such graphic examples of man's inhumanity to man. Harrison's Flowers is excellent at showing us that just as a reader we can't stop looking at the horror even though we are revolted, the journalist cannot stop photographing and documenting it even though the human side of them is revolted as well.

As for Andie MacDowell's so-called wooden performance, one must remember that in this film she is seeing her husband's and his colleagues' world through their eyes for the first time. How quickly would any of us be able to break out of our shock-like trance and be totally outraged or emotional if this were the first time we were seeing it? Even the veteran photo journalist portrayed by Brendan Gleeson was paralyzed with shock more than once in the film. Andie MacDowell's character came from such an insulated world that seemingly emotionless shock was the perfect way to portray Sarah, who simply cannot fathom what she sees unfolding around her.

Harrison's Flowers is an excellent portrayal of the Serbo-Croatian hell that descended upon that part of Europe and irreparably tore apart the life of anyone in its path.

An emotional film about a woman's search for her husband, shown through events that really happened in the Croatian city of Vukovar.

The city of Vukovar was destroyed by the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army) and Serb paramilitaries. Unfortunately, that really happened in 1991, and the hospital we see in the film really does exist, Serb paramilitaries pulled wounded Croatian civilians and soldiers out of it and killed most of them.

The massacre occurred shortly after Vukovar's capture by the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army ) and paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. In that period, it was the fiercest battle in Europe since 1945, and Vukovar was the first major European city completely destroyed since World War II.

The film is really hard to watch, because the atrocities we see in the film, committed by Serbian paramilitaries and the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army), really happened in 1991.

The cast evoked the emotions and all the horrors of the war, the film is emotional, especially for those who survived the war.

The footage showing Serb paramilitaries entering the city and singing a truly disgusting song is faithfully reconstructed in the film and when you look at the actual footage from 1991, it is almost identical.

The cinematography is realistic and the directing is excellent. An emotional and impressive film.