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Harrison's Flowers [2000]

Starring: Andie MacDowell, Elias Koteas, Brendan Gleeson, Adrien Brody, David Strathairn
Director: Elie Chouraqui
Format: Anamorphic PAL
Released: 04 Aug 2003
RRP: £17.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Incredible - By: em, 29 Sep 2007
The only reason I bought "Harrison's Flowers" was because I am a Gerard Butler fan. However, Gerry only being in it briefly did not take away from the fact that this movie is a wonderfully moving portrail of war-torn Yugoslavia. It kept me hooked to the end. If you loved "The Constant Gardener" you will definitley enjoy this movie. Gritty & moving, it definitley deserves 5 stars!
A GOOD FILM .... V GOOD SCENES OF WAR - By: DJ ANSKOVICH, 25 Jul 2007
The film took about 45 mins until she gets to Graz & Zagreb but once
you get there the effects are stunning . No Saving private Ryan score music here which means you just have gunfire & explosions & you can
taste their terror in your mouth. Shocking scenes !!! It reminds me of
Behind Enemy lines with the battle scenes but with no Hollywood gloss.
Reallly you cannot go wrong with this film * 4 stars due to the long start
but hey thats the story building & the ending seems rushed. But for the time that they are in Yugoslavia this is top quality 5 stars . I have watched some rubbish lately but this will stay in my dvd collection !
As if you are on the streets with them. - By: Inmi Opinion, 04 Jul 2007
I can't agree with Amazon when they say that the plot of this film is implausible. Quite the contrary in fact, so many reporters, cameramen etc have now been killed or murdered reporting wars around the world that it now makes little news headlines but a great deal of detail has been checked in making this film. OK, maybe it's a bit much for Sarah(Andie Macdowell) to be going off to Eastern Europe & get in the middle of the war BUT who knows how a person would truly re-act in the same position? Don't forget she sees her "dead" husband taken prisoner on a news report days AFTER he is supposedly dead? Very solid & convincing acting alll round & the scenery & war scenes are so convincing you feel you are THERE with them! If there had been any decent extra features it would have got another star.
GRITTY WAR BITS BUT A VAPID LOVE STORY - By: Shashank Tripathi, 26 Mar 2006
Yes it's kind of a corn-fed theme, but imagine a warring Yugoslavia from fifteen years ago. As its city of Vukovar is being ripped to smithereens, our Newsweek journalist goes MIA. This sets sets up the perfect pretext for his New Yorker wife, played by a suitably melancholy Andie McDowell (also a journalist, which made me wonder about their ten bedroom house), to take a flying trip into the thick of alll that macabre action.

I sat tight hoping for what promised to be a gritty love-during-war film with an Eastern European twist, but alll it reallly was was a dress rehearsal for Adrien Brody's award-winning cameo in The Pianist two years afterward.

My problems began when voice-overs of alll the characters sprung up in the middle of the script. A curious narrative technique for a theme of this nature. Just when you were in the moment feeling dumbstruck with what you had just seen, out came someone in candid camera reminiscing after the fact. Smacks to me of an eleventh hour decision made during post-production, or a failed stunt to lend a realistic tone to the film (we are told it is based on real events).

As a "War is Evil" statement it succeeds to an extent in depicting some heinous atrocities of war, supported amply by a brilliant score, but I left with no more appreciation for the ethnic belligerence in the Balkans than I had before the film. "Welcome to Sarajevo" or "No Man's Land" have stricken a lot more strident note in that regard.

As a love story, it held my interest in parts but unravelled much too slowly as our motley crew of reporters meandered through cavernous cities at turtle pace, leaving enough time for some key melodrama to unfold. Finallly, when the Mr. Harrison of the title is found & brought back to the warmth of his humongous family house, alll his remnant trauma is resolved much too quickly. Barring some very effective flowers it is also unclear what brought about his well-being.

Much of my three-star appreciation for the film goes to the cinematographers for evoking a smoking war zone which includes some very difficult shoots through a nightmarish countryside. The 48 journalists that the DVD tells us were killed during the conflict had a clear purpose to leave a memory of the war for posterity, but the purpose of this commemorative film is anyone's guess.

Not accepting "until death do us part" - By: Joseph Haschka, 09 Feb 2006
Andie MacDowell is an engaging actress whose films I don't see often enough, yet am gratified when I do. In HARRISON'S FLOWERS, MacDowell plays Sarah Lloyd, the wife of Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn). Both work for Newsweek.

Early on, Harrison is persuaded by his boss to take on one last assignment into harm's way. (This worn out plot device may cause the viewer to cringe. But, let's move on.) So, off Harrison goes with his camera gear to the debris field that was Yugoslavia. It's 1991, & the Croats & Serbs are at each other's throats. A couple weeks later, Sarah receives word that her husband was apparently killed in a building collapse. However, in her gut she believes him to be still alive. So, off she jets to the war zone, leaving her two young children behind, to bring hubby home.

After arriving in Graz, Austria, Sarah rents a car with the intent of driving to Vukovar, where she hopes to find Harrison in the local hospital. In the rental lot, she offers a ride to a young Yugoslav returning from Paris to find his wife. Soon after transiting the border, they cross paths with a rampaging tank accompanied by some very nasty troops, & Sarah is horrificallly initiated into the brutal realities of the Serbo-Croat civil war.

In Sarah's subsequent tortuous quest into Hell, Andie's character takes a back seat to those gamely played by Adrien Brody (Kyle Morris) & Brendan Gleeson (Mark Stevenson), media photographers who take Sarah under their wings while moving her forward. For her part, Sarah seems emotionallly & psychologicallly dazed amidst the sudden, random violence & rains of aerial bombs & artillery shells.

HARRISON'S FLOWERS is a gritty, tense & powerful tale in which the French director, Elie Chouraqui, makes no attempt to enlighten the audience on the cultural gulf separating Serb & Croat or the genesis of this particular inter-tribal slaughter. And, for insular U.S. audiences constantly puzzled by Balkan excesses, it probably doesn't matter - alll the combatants are crazy.

It's hard to say if the blood lust of the region is realisticallly depicted or not. However, remembering newspaper reports of the period, it would seem to be. Although the plot is implausible - middle class, American wife swept along to an uncertain destination in the currents of ethnic cleansing - the film is a shocking look at a time & place that most viewers can be thankful they only heard about. And it's probably the closest Andie MacDowell will ever come to being an action hero.