A Movie Review by Adrian Cole
The war photographer as noble and heroic: it is not a new theme, we’ve seen it before in Under Fire, Salvador, and several other movies which glorify news reporting, and I’m convinced that soon we’ll be gritting our teeth through a movie about a square-jawed Gerraldo Rivera jumping out of Black Hawks in the Sha-I-Kot valley, and saving Afghan children, while wearing red, white and blue overalls.
Harrison’s Flowers, like most of the others, leaves the viewer uneasy, conflicted, and aware that something in this portrayal of real international events is askew. When a celebrated Newsweek photographer is reported dead in the opening stages of Yugoslavia’s brutal civil war, his wife, convinced that he’s still alive, goes to the region to find him. The story is one of a loss of innocence, like many American excursions abroad, and in this sense, it has to portray that innocence first, which it does by showing us the photographer and his wife as an attractive, comfortably-off, early middle aged couple deeply in love, with two beautiful children and a fluffy golden retriever. Now I like golden retrievers and I admit that I found the imagery of their life quite appealing; Andie Mcdowell’s pouting red lips; the charm of their rustic farmhouse with hard wood floors; the husband’s greenhouse. All of this reminds us of the peace and security we take for granted in the United States, and even more so, as middle-class professionals with “lifestyles”. But the film sets up an erroneous and unfortunately ideological discrepancy between the bounteous United States, and the miserable, intractable and downright inexplicably violent nightmare Andie Mcdowell drives into across the Austrian border.
The peaceful, visually appealing idyll in which she and her family live is shockingly put in perspective when, five minutes after crossing the Croatian border, her comfortable German car is squashed by a Serbian tank, her passenger is shot in the head and she narrowly avoids being raped by a soldier with an unsettling resemblance to Vlad the Impaler. Welcome to the real world.
This is the film’s ultimate flaw, and it is a flaw which comes not from the filmmaking, but from a culture-wide obsession with individual American consciousness, and prioritizes the individual American over hoards of anonymous, faceless, voiceless non-Americans whose corpses and mutilated children lie scattered in the streets around the film’s heroes. This perspectival problem is nowhere more evident that in movies glamorizing war correspondents and photographers. And in a sense this is the only way to make a film for an American audience: we need an American protagonist who is familiar to lead us, open-mouthed, through the carnage that is the rest of the world. Without Andie Mcdowel's heightened sense of life – she is utterly, obsessively focused on finding her husband—we cannot cope with the omnipresence of death, and we need a protagonist with whom we can identify in order to make any sense out the horror. And what better candidate than someone whose designer kitchen we’ve been drooling over minutes before? Just as in Private Ryan, the focus on one individual among a sea of dead and dying risks seeming absurdly unbalanced, yet is justified in the film’s universe as the only response to the surrounding mass-murder.
During her journey, McDowell falls in with a band of hardened correspondents who at first tell her to wise up and go home, reminding her that “this is real war, real dying, real bullets,” as if “reality” itself is something entirely absent from middle class American life (which might be close to the truth). This band of photographers are portrayed, with a familiar and dubious sense of nobility, as truth-seeking martyrs, struggling against the odds to “tell the story” of this war. While it should be said that there are, no doubt brave journalists, journalists do have a choice to do what they do, and many of them are at best somewhat addicted to the excitement of trouble spots, and at worst, thrill-seeking war junkies. As with many of the world’s hot-spots, American and other foreign journalists can come and go with plane tickets, passports and credit cards which can pluck them out of a war zone and deposit them in the bar of a cozy Sheraton (for many, their natural habitat) somewhere across the border, where they can tell their stories to each other and compare their feats of heroism. For the Croatian civilians, however, they don’t get past the checkpoints, but get raped, mutilated and murdered for their pains. And they get to tell no one. The movie fails in this respect, too, because apart from a brief appearance by a Croat who is trying to get back into Yugoslavia from Austria to find his wife and baby, and is killed within minutes, Croats do not feature in the movie except as dead meat.
In stark contrast to the fate of the Croatians and the rest of the swiftly unraveling Yugoslavia under Milosevic, the film ends with Mcdowell miraculously finding her husband among the ruins of Vukovar hospital in the middle of an onslaught by the Serbian forces. They go home, and although he has been traumatized by a bomb-blast, he recovers enough to tend, once again, to his glass house full of exotic flora. The rest of his days are spent photographing flowers. What purpose has been served, we wonder as we leave the theatre? Has some great truth been revealed, like, life sucks, unless you’re American, in which case it can suck for a little while if you go to someone else’s country? The film’s dedication mentions the 48 journalists who died covering the Yugoslavian war. Let’s mourn them, for sure, but the movie begs the question: is war about journalists? And do they really think they are the heroes, or is this a role we thrust upon them so as to not look so hard at the real questions of politics, war and peace, and our role in them in a rapidly globalizing world?