Go back to Arts & Features pageSome stories get told because somebody has an itch to tell them. Others get told because somebody wants to teach you a lesson.
The War -- a new family drama set in rural Mississippi in the summer of 1970, centering on a group of kids defending a beloved treehouse from the town bullies -- is so overburdened with didactic intent you keep waiting for it to collapse before your eyes. This is a film with more symbols per scene than any audience should ever have to encounter -- and enough uplifting morals to occupy a whole year of Sunday School classes.
Stu Simmons (Elijah Wood) and his twin sister, Lidia (Lexi Randall), aren't exactly happy kids: Since their father, Stephen (Kevin Costner), returned from Vietnam, he hasn't been able to hold a job, and the family had to give up its house for a welfare shack. In an early scene in Kathy McWorter's screenplay, Stephen tells Stu that his unexplained lengthy absences have been time spent in a mental hospital for post-traumatic stress.
Lengthy flashbacks show us what Stephen can't get over: He was unable to rescue his wounded best friend in a savage firefight. Now he's become a turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy, and he tries to raise his kids that way.
But it's tough to be a non-violent kid when you're up against neighbors like the Lipnickis, The War's heavies -- a crooked-toothed, grimy-faced brood of scavengers who live at a junkyard. They plod heavily and carry big sticks. When they're not terrorizing other kids, they're being abused by their alcoholic father (Raynor Scheine).
The War is directed by Jon Avnet, who made his debut with the popular Southern tales of Fried Green Tomatoes, and it's full of its own brand of dusty corn pone. When Stephen takes some cotton candy he has just bought for his family and gives it away to the nasty Lipnicki kids, Stu protests, but his father explains, "They look like they haven't been given nothing in a long time." When Lydia displays some contempt for her father's inability to get work, her mother scolds her: "You cut him down, you're cutting me down -- you're cutting down yourself!"
In the kind of tidily ordered moral universe The War constructs -- a grubbier update of Horton Foote's nostalgia -- every wrong has an opportunity to be righted, every wound a time for healing, every mistake its moment of redemption. Stephen, for instance, gets to work through his survivor's guilt when he takes a job at a mine and rescues a colleague after a cave-in.
But the main focus here is on the kids and their moral progress. Boy, do they have lessons to learn -- about compassion and racial tolerance, fighting for what you believe in, but not fighting just for the sake of fighting.
In one climactic scene, Stu and the Lipnicki boys scale a decaying old water tower and climb down into it on a dare, seeing who's tough or crazy enough to swim across the roiling whirlpool in its depths. In another, the Lipnickis launch a raid on the Simmons kids' precious tree-fort, and they defend it with armaments from their father's old footlocker.
By this point, you're painfully aware that Avnet and McWorter hang enormous symbolic importance on just about every object you see on the screen -- not just the much-contested fort, which has been built with scraps of the Simmons' demolished former home, but even little things like the lost key to Costner's character's footlocker. If there isn't enough spiritual significance for you in all this, there's also plenty of talk about miracles and angels watching from on high.
The filmmakers have found a magnificently gnarled, ancient oak tree as the home for the kids' fort, and they've filled The War with colorful backwoods talk. (I don't think I've ever before heard anything quite like the line, "I ain't telling you ding-diddly ding- diddly ding dang dong!") They also make manipulative, opportunistic use of over-soundtracked '60s pop classics like "Who'll Stop the Rain." "Gimme Shelter" and (weirdly) Norman Greenbaum's tongue-in- cheek "Spirit in the Sky" accompany the "Lord of the Flies"-like scenes of juvenile combat.
Elijah Wood, even in these surroundings, remains our best child actor, and he brings a certain amount of visceral credibility to Stu's quiet, preadolescent angst. Costner, on the other hand, is growing increasingly repugnant in the righteous, smugly paternal roles that have become his turf. How much more mileage can an actor get from a sensitive scowl?
The War will appeal to you if you can mine meaning from a fatuous line like, "'No matter how many people think they understand war, war will never understand people." As it proceeds, the film starts asserting a variety of quasi-spiritual agendas that will prompt tears from the susceptible and eye-rolling from the rest of us.
One of the many morals tacked onto its finale is: "With God's help, human beings can do anything." Maybe what The War needs is a little more divine assistance.
Go back to Arts & Features page