IN LOVE AND WAR (29)

Directed by: Richard Attenborough

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Chris O'Donnell, Mackenzie Astin

The Pitch: In Northern Italy during WWI, an American nurse ministers to the wounded - including the 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway, with whom she falls in love.

Theo Sez: The teaming of these two stars (the girl and boy next door, respectively) results in a predictably pallid movie : quite simply, neither has the wildness of spirit to suggest a tempestuous wartime romance - you can barely imagine them backpacking in a youth hostel, let alone volunteering for front-line duty in a war zone halfway round the world. What's admirable, and rather poignant, is the way it ends on a minor key - as in this director's previous weepie, the excellent SHADOWLANDS, the pain of heartbreak is the only way arrogance can mature into a true understanding of the world. What's not so admirable is the lack of visual imagination and the acres of limp, witless dialogue, a particular disadvantage in a film about a famous writer - even if the rather puppyish O'Donnell could suggest the leonine presence (or at least image) of Hemingway, it's impossible to connect such hackneyed lines ("You're gonna be all right - I promise you") with such an individual character ; even the scene where our hero undertakes to write a letter to a dead comrade's parents - an excellent opportunity to show the burgeoning writer behind this rather callow young man - is wasted, the letter supposedly touching but in fact irretrievably banal. Not terrible, quite handsome, but fatally blah ; and any film that begins with a voice-over saying "I didn't know it at the time, but the choices I made that summer would affect me for the rest of my life" should be prohibited by law.