Susan Granger’s review of “HARRISON’S FLOWERS” (Universal Focus)
“Photographs comprise the communal memory of our time” – and this story revolves around the photo-journalists who risk their lives to chronicle history. Sarah Lloyd (Andie MacDowell) is passionately in love with her husband, Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn), a Pulitzer Prize-winning “Newsweek” photographer and devoted father to their two young children. After too many years in war zones, Harrison says his “luck bank is down to zero” and wants to quit. He’d prefer to tend his beloved hot-house flowers. But he’s talked into one last gig: photographing the “ethnic skirmishes” in Bosnia. Predictably, tragedy occurs: Harrison disappears and is presumed dead. Convinced he’s still alive and that she can bring him back, Sarah leaves their suburban New Jersey home and adroitly makes her way into the brutal chaos of the horrific Balkan killing fields, where she’s befriended by Kyle (Adrien Brody) one of her husband’s young, jealous rivals. Dazzled by her bold determination to get to the war-torn city of Vukovar, where Harrison was last seen, and discover the truth, he agrees to accompany her, and they’re reluctantly joined by an Irishman (Brendan Gleeson) and Harrison’s cohort (Elias Koteas). French writer/director Elie Chouraqui – and co-writers Didier le Pecheur and Isabel Ellsen – cleverly set this complex, compelling love story against the non-stop carnage and atrocities of the Serbo-Croatian conflict. Portraying a conflicted, multi-layered character, Andie MacDowell dominates the film with her astonishingly relentless, ferocious, yet vulnerable intensity, while her male co-stars lend strong support. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Harrison’s Flowers” is an explosive, intense 8. Fittingly, the film is dedicated to the 48 journalists who lost their lives in Yugoslavia between 1991-95.
