Sandra Bullock has had her hits and misses throughout her twenty-five-year film career, but nothing she’s done has come close to the misfire of the mid-90’s World War 1 drama In Love and War. When she misses big, she makes awful turkeys like Premonition and All About Steve. When she kind of misses, we get movies like Gun Shy and Murder by Numbers. But In Love and War is another beast entirely, because it’s one of the few early films she made the reaches for the stars but fails entirely. There’s a reason Sandra has never made another historical epic; she doesn’t really fit in this genre.
This Historical Epic Features One of Sandra Bullock's Most Stilted Performances, Making For a Rather Boring Endeavor
Sandra told Oscar-winning director Richard Attenborough before filming to make sure she doesn’t do any “Bullock-isms,” basically saying she wanted to play the character straight and not bring any of her trademark charm and wit. Well, the old geezer listened to her, and so she gives her character almost zero personality, making for one of the least interesting characters she’s played in her entire career. It doesn’t help that Sandra doesn’t really have the look of an early 1900’s nurse; there’s just something really modern about her, both in her face and in her personality, even when she does something as simply as smiling. Chris O’Donnell plays her love interest, Ernest Hemingway, a man who spends much of the movie interested in having sex with and marrying Sandra’s nurse character than in developing his writing. There was a period in the mid-90’s where Chris O’Donnell starred in movies, and while he’s OK in an ensemble, he doesn’t have much presence to carry a two-hour historical epic. To make matters worse, he has zero chemistry with Sandra.
In Love and War can be looked at as Sandra’s first shot at an Academy Award (the studio released this film limited at the end of December, then released it wide in January of 1997), but it’s more likely a job that she simply had to say yes to, because two years before she was taking small roles in movies like The Thing Called Love and Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (that latter film having not as much to do with Hemingway as this film). When the man who made Gandhi tells you he wants you to star in his next big epic, it makes sense to say yes, and so here Sandra is in this muddled film, looking lost for most of the running time. Sandra said she took time off from making movies in 2003 because she wasn’t happy with a lot of the work she was doing, and it’s probable that In Love and War was one of the projects she was referring to.
In Love and War Failed at the Box Office, and it Certainly Hasn't Held Up at All in the Last 15 Years
The film is stilted from the start, with a brief WW1 battle scene that looks like it was shot in one day on a small budget, then the rest of the film finds Ernest Hemingway in the hospital he’s sent to recover in, with nurse Agnes taking care of him day and night, trying to save his leg. He starts hitting on her right away, and she ignores him. For the first hour, she ignores him, and then, on a night when she mourns the loss of one of her patients, she finds herself drawn to him, even kissing him. When he comes to visit her after switching to a camp, she decides to have sex with him in an ugly brothel. Then he leaves, she decides she loves him, but then sends him a letter saying they can’t be together anymore. And then, in a longwinded final scene, she tells him she loves him, but he tells her to leave, and they never see each other again. Sandra Bullock told Pete Hammond at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February 2010 that of all the films she’s made, In Love and War was the one she wished she could go back to, knowing what she knows now, and do over again. Maybe she could’ve spent a few extra months working directly with the writer on the screenplay.
Ten years before the release of In Love and War, Sandra was getting struck in the neck by a poisonous dart in her laughable film debut Hangmen. So by the end of 1996, Sandra Bullock had definitely come a long way. After the huge success of that summer’s A Time to Kill, Sandra was officially a high-profile movie star, and while her career would take some bad hits over the next five years, it was safe to say that Sandra was here to stay. Most everybody in the world have forgotten about In Love and War, because it’s not a good movie, and it’s not an awful movie; it’s just there. There’s no drama, no romance, and it has a bummer of an ending that lacks the emotional gravitas a film like this needs. Most would believe Sandra’s follow up Speed 2 is the worse movie, but at least that dumb action film has moments of life, while In Love and War has such little entertainment value it’s hard to believe anyone at the time could have taken it seriously.
- BEST SCENE: The sex scene has some energy, but probably the most memorable scene has Sandra slowly walk up to Ernest Hemingway and slap him hard in the face
- BEST LINE: "Then close your eyes."
- NEXT UP: Rush hour hits the water as Sandra sinks and drowns in the big summer sequel Speed 2: Cruise Control
