Hart's War

By TIM WATKIN

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Hart's war was limited to the European winter of 1944-45. As a senator's son posted to the safety of HQ, his war was supposed to be as unremarkable as you might expect this movie to be.

In both cases, the assumptions are proved wrong. Unexpectedly, Hart finds himself dodging bullets, and Hart's War is the most compelling of Hollywood's present batch of war movies.

After his capture and torture, Lt Tom Hart (Farrell) is sent to Stalag VI, where he is joined by two black air force officers. Their arrival exposes the depth of American racism at the time, pointedly compared with the racism of the Nazis. When the camp commandant, Col Werner Visser (the brilliant Iures), compares Russians to animals, fourth-generation military hardman Col William McNamara (Willis) smugly says his country doesn't make such distinctions. But when one of the airmen is murdered, the American hypocrisy is exposed.

The surviving black officer, Lt Lincoln Scott (Howard), is blamed when the man thought to be responsible for his friend's murder is himself found dead. McNamara demands a trial and appoints Hart, a law student before the war, to defend Scott.

What began as a war action film and became a POW drama is suddenly a morality tale and courtroom drama as well. Surprisingly, the plot, cast and director Gregory Hoblit carry this burden. To Hoblit's credit, he avoids US jingoism and keeps his audience guessing.

The film does follow the rules of POW films - nuggety allied commander, murderous commandant, secret radios and escape tunnels - and is not overly subtle in its anti-racism preaching. But its twisting plot, grim performances, and most of all its moral ambiguity overcome that.

At the start, the landscape is pretty with white snow, a metaphor for Hart's innocence. But after he crashes his jeep and is thrown into a pile of picturesque, snow-covered corpses, his black and white war turns decidedly grey.

As the scenery changes, so does our sense of right and wrong. The audience is forced to ask the same questions as the characters: whose side are you on? It's a tricky one when the hero is a coward, the brave commander a racist brute and the vicious Nazi a jazz-loving intellectual.

As Hart says: "Everything in this place is a lie".

The end is overplayed as the core characters try to out-noble each other, but it doesn't defeat the message that even in war where everything and everyone is wrong, honour can still be found.

Cast: Colin Farrell, Bruce Willis, Marcel Iures, Terrence Howard

Director: Gregory Hoblit

Rating: R13 (violence, offensive language)

Running Time: 125 minutes

Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas