Word: emmette
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...metaphoric about the empty space left in her life by the war; her father was killed in Viet Nam before she could know him. Her mother having remarried and moved away, Samantha has chosen to stay behind and share the tumbledown family home in Hopewell, Ky., with her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a veteran damaged by the war in some way he refuses to name. Now in the summer after her high school graduation, she comes upon the letters her dad wrote from Nam, and eventually his diary. Using this material to chart her way, she sets out, innocent...
...final few scenes of the movie, which bring together Emmett, Samantha and her grandmother at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington D.C. are undeniably moving. They show by their contrast with the rest of In Country exactly how fine a film was lost in the production of this motion picture...
Vietnam veteran Emmett Smith (Bruce Willis) is in the audience watching the graduation of his niece Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) from the local high school in Hopewell, Kentucky Samantha never knew her father who was her age when he left to fight in Vietnam but she does become obsessed with the need to find out about her father, and she is dismayed to find that no one around her is willing to talk about...
...result of a bad screenplay and a poor acting job on the part of Lloyd is a movie which lacks pacing, coherence and emotional depth for its first hour. But as In Country shifts its focus more toward the relationship between Samantha and Emmett, the movie gains a lot of the truth and pathos which was missing from the start...
Willis does a wonderful job of portraying Emmett Smith the reclusive, cynical and alienated veteran of the Vietnam conflict. He brings a hard-edged intensity to an underwritten character who should have commanded more of In Country's focus. Richard Hamilton and Peggy Rea also lend a much needed sense of realism to the movie with their fine portrayals of Samantha's grandparents...