Three Men and a Land Mine
Oscar winner No Man's Land tells frequently potent tale of Balkan bloodshed
No Man's Land
dir.: Danis Tanovic
R, 98 min.
Opening Friday at the Belcourt Theatre
In the first five minutes of the Bosnian antiwar statement No Man's Land, a small band of Croatian citizen-soldiers stumble through the dark and bicker about cigarettes; then day breaks, and all but two are butchered by an entrenched regiment of Serbs. When watching Danis Tanovic's Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, it's best not to get too attached to any one character. Tanovic certainly doesn't; the writer-director uses his men and women for their symbolic meanings and satirical possibilities. No Man's Land is toothsomely metaphorical, not delicate.
The story builds from a simple theatrical concept. The two surviving Croatians, Chiki (played by Branko Djuric) and Cera (Filip Sovagovic), meet up with two Serbs in the "middle trench" of disputed territory. Chiki shoots and kills one Serb officer, but not before the cruel captain plants a bouncing mine under an unconscious Cera. When Cera wakes up and moves off the bomb, it'll jump into the air and explode, sending a payload of tiny metal balls through the bunker, shredding everything and everybody, including Chiki and the remaining Serb, Nino (Rene Bitorajac). Once the enemies realize the dilemma, they form an uneasy alliance, working together to alert the U.N. peacekeeping troops to their predicament; but a deep-rooted distrust and a need to maintain the upper hand threatens the rescue.
Tanovic ambitiously opens up what could've been a claustrophobic psychodrama by carrying the action out to the opposing camps, then throughout the U.N. hierarchy, and finally to the international media, as cable news reporter Jane Livingstone (played by Mike Leigh regular Katrin Cartlidge) strives to capture the senseless horror and, with luck, to capture some bloody, ratings-grabbing footage. Tanovic's none-too-subtle critique of misguided journalists and ass-covering U.N. workers hits several false notes. Not that his portrayal is inaccurate, but it throws the soldiers'-eye-view of civil conflict out of balance. Moving outside the booby-trapped trench keeps the narrative peppy—and allows for a useful mid-film mini-history of the region's troubles—but the extra layers also sandbag the presumed purpose of the film: to break hostility down to its human component.
Nonetheless, No Man's Land is tense and often grimly funny, shot through with the heavy ironies that give potency to an "ah, the absurdity of war" film. More than once, Tanovic reduces the madness of the Bosnian struggle to a single image, such as the sleeping body on the land mine, or Chiki and Nino holding each other at gunpoint and forcing the other to admit that his side started the war. The ways that Chiki and Nino waver between budding friendship and bitter resentment make the movie's point better than Tanovic's caricatures of fatuous, do-nothing U.N. officials. As more characters crowd into the story, the more we yearn to return to the handful of faces at the center of that story—and the center of the problem.
—Noel Murray
Hits, runs, errors
When a baseball movie comes out—especially one like The Rookie, based on the heartwarming true story of a 35-year-old rookie pitcher who followed his dream to the majors—writers' hearts get warmer than most. Baseball is the sport intellectuals don't mind loving, the game artistic types and liberals wax lyrical about.
Most movies about the sport, however, get made in the cruel reality of the athletic marketplace—namely, that football and basketball get all the hype and glory. And so baseball movies practically apologize every step of the way for making their audience watch any baseball. Officious announcers or voiceovers represent the hero's thoughts, to explain how what we are watching could possibly be dramatic. For fans, it's like having someone lean over during the windup and explain the suicide squeeze.
So fans have reason to be impressed when The Rookie's hero, small-town chemistry teacher and baseball coach Jim Morris (Dennis Quaid), has his team actually execute a suicide squeeze without anyone even saying the words. Better still, when Morris later nods to a catcher's sign of one finger tapped on the inside thigh, no ghostly Quaid voiceover intones, "Brush him back with an inside fastball." Such moments help to explain why many oft-disappointed reviewers have given The Rookie a walk. The film assumes we know our baseball, and that covers a lot of sins.
But not enough. Proving once again that there's no true story Hollywood doesn't think it can improve, screenwriter Mike Rich punctuates the saga with disconcertingly predictable scenes. Since Morris is a family man, his wife (Rachel Griffiths) must remind him of his duty to his kids; five minutes later, she must forswear doubting her man, providing both conflict and inspiration. When Morris and another call-up walk into the ballpark at Arlington, they gawk at the plush visitors' locker room like awestruck bush-leaguers—although they came from the tony Durham Bulls, whose facilities are hardly Spartan.
Quaid has grown into these middle-aged roles nicely, and he executes with perfect timing a puzzled, stunned expression as his star rises in the baseball world. His ragtag bunch of Texas high-schoolers might be a little too Bad News Bears-ish, but they provide motivation and a few good laughs. Director John Lee Hancock, however, can't resist goosing the film a little at every opportunity. Quaid can throw convincingly, but his arm doesn't have that unnatural backward bend that would make his 98 mph fastball plausible. As a result, every time he pitches—every time—we hear a whooshing sound effect straight out of some karate movie, followed by a cut to somebody's eyes bugging out. Even the normally understated composer Carter Burwell is called upon for Natural-style chill-bump music as Morris faces down the mighty Royce Clayton.
The Rookie isn't a bad baseball movie, but in its rush to be liked more, it can't resist tripping over its own feet. Fearing that the story's reality wouldn't measure up—even though in Jim Morris' case, it did—the filmmakers ended up failing moviegoers and baseball fans alike. Their movie would have been all the sweeter with a lot less hokum.
—Donna Bowman
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