Harrison's Flowers (2000)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

A wife searches for her photojournalist husband in war-torn Yugoslavia. She has the help of some other journalists who had left her husband for dead. We see the Serbian army killing anyone and everyone in its path, and even the destruction of a hospital. I guessed the movie must have been filmed in the Czech Republic, and I was right. Sad to say, some of the scenes probably did not need much "dressing" to suggest the utter destruction wrought by the blood-mad Serbs. Andie MacDowell is the determined wife and David Strathairn is the missing husband. They are supported in their efforts by gifted actors like Elias Koteas, Adrian Brody and Brendan Gleason. Based on a book, this is a compelling love story using modern war as a backdrop.

I come from the war in ex Yugoslavia, movie is so realistic, only is confusing for others who don't understand who was chetniks and croatian soldiers, Nustar, Vinkovci or Vukovar. Thanks to this movie to showing the rest of population how bloody that war was, thanks to the journalist who was there to witnessing the killings of the innocent people, making that movie it's just one step to leaving the message: please, to never happened again! Rest of the world was quiet watching the news, silent, without any help. Who was the victims, civilians on both side, movie didn't say that many of the people from hospital, wounded, chetniks kill them after occupation of Vukovar. The theme of the movie is love. I like the movie, first movie what showing the part of reality what really happened there, but really victims was croatian what movie didn't say. Serbian attack the Vukovar, still now Croatia looking for many of missing people. Milosevich free many criminals from jail in Serbia to fight against innocent civilians, this was the reason why terrible thinks happened. Thanks for this movie!

The love story of this movie is so silly (someone already wrote it in previous comments). Also, the story about war in Yugoslavia, about Croatian and Serbian people is so wrong. It can't be that only Serbs did things that are shown in the movie. The truth is that Croatian people did the same awful things and they are not shown in the movie in the right way. Do you know how many innocent Serbs, women, children, were killed by Croatian army in so terrible way?If you decide to see this movie i would like to recommend you first to inform your self about this war and to find out a true story about it. I wouldn't recommend this movie.

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.