ALT="[Love and War]" width=225 height=146 align=right hspace=15 vspace=5> That Ernest Hemingway! What a great writer, what an amazing life! Maybe someone should make a movie about him. These thoughts didn't seem to occur to the brain trust behind In Love and War, Richard Attenborough's banal and pointless effort to dramatize the young Hemingway's infatuation with the nurse who tended to him when he was wounded while serving as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy during the waning days of World War I. Chris O'Donnell, the Boy Wonder, as the youth who would become the Nobel Prize-winning wellspring of American fiction? True, Hemingway was an asshole too, but at least you believed he knew how to read, and even write. The story, which a literary genius transformed into A Farewell to Arms, is here debased into a passel of clichés.

Hemingway, portrayed by O'Donnell as a wise-ass teen even more callow and charmless than Tom Cruise in Top Gun, gets bored with serving coffee and doughnuts to wounded vets and takes a jaunt to the front lines. There he chums around with some Italian soldiers until they all get blown up. Maybe he was heroic, maybe not; the facts don't matter here, never mind the truth. He and older nurse Sandra Bullock fall in love, but it doesn't work out. Social conventions are blamed, but it's mostly because they are the least exciting movie couple since Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway in Don Juan DeMarco. So he gets mad and writes novels and later kills himself. The horror and disillusionment of the Great War? The passion and futility of true love? The link between courage and the creative endeavor? Sorry, wrong movie. But I understand Ernest Hemingway wrote some interesting books on those subjects.