IN LOVE AND WAR
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: ** out of ****
I love war movies. I also love Sandra Bullock. My girlfriend once said that my favorite movie in the world would be a war movie WITH Sandra Bullock. A couple of months later, IN LOVE AND WAR was released and I thought that I had perhaps found this favorite film. However, after seeing some previews and commercials, the movie didn't seem to be all that interesting, and I never even made it to the theater. Since it was recently released on video, I decided to check it out and see what I missed. As it turns out, I didn't miss much.
Richard Attenborough's IN LOVE AND WAR is about the love affair between a young Ernest Hemingway (Chris O'Donnell) and Agnes von Kurowsky (Sandra Bullock), a nurse with the Red Cross, and is set in Italy during the last year of World War I. I learned in high school that Hemingway was an ambulance driver, but I didn't see him driving any ambulances. Instead, he seemed more like a male Doughnut Dolly whose job it was to hand out candy bars and cigarettes. In the movie, Hemingway is overly eager to see some action on the front line, so he sneaks out one night and visits with some Italian soldiers. Not long after he arrives, an artillery shell strikes the trench where he and his new friends are sitting. He carries a wounded young Italian from the trench to safety, getting hit in the leg by a machine gun on the way. Hemingway is taken to a hospital staffed by American nurses, and is tended to by von Kurowsky, of whom he is immediately enamored. Although he makes it a priority to have his love requited, her affections are divided between Hemingway and an Italian doctor (Domenico Caracciolo) who is also courting her.
Sandra Bullock puts in a decent performance, but there is not much that's attractive about her character. We really don't get a good idea of why two men (three if you count Hemingway's war buddy Henry Villard, played by MacKenzie Astin) are so desperately in love with her. There's really nothing special from a personality point of view, and in this movie, Bullock looks relatively plain. Her character could be summed up by the word "bland".
Chris O'Donnell, however, does a good job of playing the young, brash, but sometimes thoughtful Hemingway. O'Donnell takes the character through a wide variety of emotions but never over-does it.
Attenborough takes his time in developing the relationship between Hemingway and von Kurowsky. It's nice to see a film in which sparks do not fly fifteen minutes after the credits. Unfortunately, the sparks, when they do happen, seem faked. This is partly due to the seeming inability of the von Kurowsky character to make up her mind. Which of the two men does she really love? Her relationship with the doctor seems cold, but her relationship with Hemingway is consistently interrupted because of it. Her scenes with Hemingway are therefore more like vignettes than a progression of a well cultivated love.
I expected more from Attenborough, who brought us such great movies as A BRIDGE TOO FAR and GHANDI. Although he made pretty good use of the Italian scenery, and even threw in a sweeping battle scene quite reminiscent of Lewis Milestone's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, it did not save the film from looking just like any other movie filmed in a scenic location. Perhaps the source material, which was mainly taken from von Kurowskys diaries, simply did not lend itself to such a film, and perhaps Attenborough did not want to stray too far from the truth. Whatever the case, the film ended up relatively pedestrian, with a disappointing ending.
One note: With the exception of A TIME TO KILL, Sandra Bullock's films since WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING have not had much acclaim, critically or at the box office. In case you're counting, that's four out of five films in the past two years. When I say I love Sandra Bullock, I'm forgiving several of her roles and a few of her performances. Unlike a lot of fanatics out there, I don't believe she's ready to win any non-popularity-based awards just yet, but I do think she has a certain infectious charm which is evident in interviews and which comes through in light-hearted roles. While I laud her for stretching her acting skills by attempting a variety of parts, I hope she does not stray too far from playing the kinds of characters which caused to many people to fall in love with her in the first place. At any rate, I suppose I'll have to keep waiting for that favorite film.
Review posted October 14, 1997
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