THE WAR
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Elijah Wood, Kevin Costner, Mare Winningham, Lexi Randall. Screenplay: Kathy McWorter. Director: Jon Avnet.
If they gave out Academy Awards for earnestness, THE WAR would have to be one of the front-runners. War, it solemnly intones, is bad; so are racism and sexism. And so they are. But THE WAR unfolds as though it had discovered those concepts, never letting an opportunity for an applause-generating speech go by the wayside. As a result, some very impressive performances are wasted on a script that just tries far too hard to deliver a very simplistic moral.
THE WAR is the story of the Simmons family, living in Juliette, Mississippi circa 1970. Father Stephen (Kevin Costner) is recently returned from Vietnam, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and unable to hold down a job, leaving it to mom Lois (Mare Winningham) to keep the family afloat. Their two children, meanwhile, face battles of their own. Stu (Elijah Wood) and his friends find themselves in perpetual conflict with a surly group of siblings called the Lipnickis; Lidia (Lexi Randall) finds out about racism through the mistreatment of her black best friends in school. But the siblings share a love of their treehouse fort, and learn their own lessons about war when the Lipnickis try to take it from them.
Screenwriter Kathy McWorter clearly has her heart in the right place. The problem is that it's in too many places. If all she had wanted to do was to create an allegorical tale about war, it might have worked; instead she adds scenes like the one in a summer school classroom where a racist teacher (Christine Baranski) unfairly accuses Lidia's friend Elvadine (LaToya Chisholm) of disrupting the class. It's not even enough that Elvadine gets to tell off the teacher in a completely over-the-top speech; Lidia has to get her two cents in as well. McWorter appears convinced that wherever one speech is good, two must be even better. Actually, no speeches would have been preferable most of the time, particularly in a scene where poor Elijah Wood practically has to deliver a sermon while trying to save someone's life. The script is overloaded with homilies, and needed a good re-write at least fifteen minutes shorter.
One of the goals of that re-write should have been removing the characters of Lidia and her friends entirely. The relationship between the Simmons siblings is given only a cursory treatment, and the narration Lidia provides could just as easily have been provided by Stu, or not at all. The girls seem to exist primarily to create a battle of the sexes with Stu's friends (which the girls win, naturally) and for the classroom sub-plot which is really superfluous. THE WAR is first and foremost about the relationship between Stu and Stephen, and there are too many tangents which ignore that relationship.
When Costner and Wood are the focus of attention, THE WAR is actually quite compelling. Costner gives an intelligent, understated performance which shows Stephen's desperate attempts to find purpose in the post-Vietnam world where he needs to feel he's making a difference, and to impress upon his children the futility of fighting, while Wood gives Stu an undercurrent of anger towards Stephen even as he tries to support him. There is tremendous conflict in their relationship, and both actors do a fine job of bringing it out. Sadly, McWorter and director Jon Avnet are more interested in heavy-handedness than they are in character study, so that by the time the climactic battle for the treehouse rolls around, the point has been made and made and made again. Then, just in case you missed it the first ten times, "Peace Train" plays over the closing credits.
Now let me get this straight: war is bad, right?
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 treehouses: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews