A Stitch in Time

IN COUNTRY Directed by Norman Jewison

Screenplay by Frank Pierson and Cynthia Cidre

Viet Nam represents a great jagged gash in the fabric of American history, an ugly tear in a tapestry that people once believed had been woven out of high ideals and simple decency. A few years ago, when it became obvious that it was time to repair that rent, our popular culture took on something of the air of a vast quilting bee, with writers, filmmakers and TV producers bending over their restorative needlework.

Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) of In Country, an adaptation of the novel by Bobbie Ann Mason, is a direct, even artless, projection of this healing spirit. There is nothing 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 but determined, to reimagine her father and the long-ago war that took him from her.

Samantha's straight-ahead spirit as evoked by Lloyd is irresistibly winning. Eventually it becomes the wedge that pries Emmett out of his shell and forces the girl's grandmother Mamaw (Peggy Rea) to face the feelings that she too has denied since her son's death. These are superb performances as well: Willis has never employed his alert reserve to better effect; Rea perfectly catches both the refrigerator-tidying comedy and the unspoken yearnings of an American Everymom.

In its early passages, In Country's script perhaps pursues too many banal and inconsequential matters as it portrays teen life in a small town. Samantha has a boyfriend who does not match her in wit and spirit. She has a girlfriend contending with an unwelcome pregnancy. But the film starts to gather force and direction when a dance, organized to honor the local Viet vets, works out awkwardly. And when -- at Samantha's insistence -- Emmett and Mamaw join her on a pilgrimage to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the movie achieves real power. Director Norman Jewison understates his final sequence with admirable tact. No melodramatic shocks of recognition, no epiphanies -- merely simple people silently touching the names of loved ones inscribed on the memorial, tentatively, thoughtfully restoring connections. It is just fine, just right, just enough for now. In Country is, finally, a lovely, necessary little stitch in our torn time.