I was mentally prepared for Harrison's Flowers to be tough to watch, and it is, though it manages to do so completely independently of any similarities the film may share with the real-life tragedy of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.  I don't know how accurate or believable its story is (and, at times, it does seem kind of absurd), but it's as brutally shocking and horrifyingly emotional as Black Hawk Down, and was probably made for a fraction of the cost.

Comparisons to Pearl will be inevitable, as Flowers is about a married American (and Jewish) journalist who gets killed while covering a strange new kind of war for a prestigious publication, but the similarities pretty much end there.  Here, Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn, Limbo) is a Pultizer Prize-winning photojournalist for Newsweek who, as the film opens in late 1991, tells boss Samuel Brubeck (Alun Armstrong, The Mummy Returns) he wants to hang up his camera and spend more time with his wife Sarah (Andie MacDowell, Town & Country) and their two kids.

Brubeck says he'll consider it and sends Harrison on One Last Assignment, a quick one-week job in Yugoslavia to cover the "ethnic skirmishes" that have just started to garner international attention.  Despite the possibility of missing the birthday of his increasingly distant son (Scott Anton), Harrison goes but is reported killed soon after.  Sarah finds out the next day as she gets to work (she's also a Newsweek employee) and everyone is giving her those "Oh, shit – what are we supposed to say?" stares.  Though nobody actually tells her what happened, she reads it in their faces and her legs give out. It's a really good scene, but you've probably all seen it in the damn trailer.

Because Harrison's body was never recovered, Sarah is missing a sense of closure (just like Kevin Costner in Dragonfly).  She understandably heads off the deep end, locking herself in Harrison's study and watching the non-stop coverage of the war on CNN.  One day, she thinks she sees him on a news report and decides to go to Yugoslavia to see if she can find her husband (but as far as we can tell, she has no plans to seek revenge on his killers, a la Arnold Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage).

Within minutes of getting near the action (Flowers was filmed in and around Prague), Sarah's rental car is run over by a tank, her hitchhiking passenger is executed, and the only thing that keeps her from being raped and killed is the escalation of a nearby gunfight.  And Sarah's trip only becomes more and more harrowing as she plods on, against the advice of the international photojournalists who find her beaten body crumpled in the road.

She befriends two of them, who help her in her Wizard of Oz-like quest down the Yellow Brick Road to Vukovar – Adrien Brody (Bread and Roses) is her lanky, hook-nosed Scarecrow and Brendan Gleeson (The Tailor of Panama) is the Cowardly Lion.  Elias Koteas' (Collateral Damage) Tin Man doesn't show up right away, and when he does, the film suddenly shifts in tone, with Koteas providing narration where there previously was none.  Instead of defending themselves against flying monkeys, Sarah and company stop to comfort the occasional wounded, thick-ankled grandmother and snap pictures with Harrison's unused film.

While the story does seem pretty unbelievable at times, it's awfully entertaining to watch.  I've never really thought much of MacDowell as an actress (her talent seems to ebb and flow with the quality of the material), but she does a great job here, offering the finest horrified reaction shots this side of Jennifer Garner's Sidney Bristow.  Like Sarah, we're dumbstruck by the things she sees, and I think her performance is so strong that it could connect with viewers and take them on a ride powerful enough to make them overlook the potentially improbable parts of the film.

Flowers was directed by Elie Chouraqui (his first English-language film), who also produced and co-wrote the script with photojournalist Isabel Ellsen and Don't Let Me Die on a Sunday writer-director Didier Le Pêcheur.  Unlike the drab We Were Soldiers, Flowers was nicely photographed by Nicola Pecorini, the cinematographer on both Rules of Engagement and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (yeah, the film was financed in France).

1:59 –

for strong war violence and gruesome images, pervasive language and brief drug use