Home Front

By RICHARD CORLISS

The voice, with its deep drawl and homespun poetry, sounds familiar. "Mah name's Lidia Simmons, an' Ah'm 12 yeahs ol'. An' these here're mah memoirs." Jeez Louise -- it's Forrest Gump as a girl! With scenes of slow-talking good guys in the U.S. South and dead buddies on Vietnam battlefields, The War might seem the first in a bunch of Gumpthings hoping to replicate that film's $285 million success story. But on a smaller scale, The War is a bigger movie and, for all its weepy trappings, a more adventurous one. It hints that it will be a familiar, Stand by Me-ish rite-of-passage picture; then it explodes into a kid's version of Apocalypse Now.

Lidia (Lexi Randall) and her younger brother Stu (Elijah Wood) have it rough. Mom (Mare Winningham) has to be the family glue, because Dad (Kevin Costner) has returned from Vietnam damaged and crushed. By most standards, he is a failure, so he pours his ambitions into his kids, who think he's a saint. "Maybe he died in that war," one of them says, "and God sent him back to us for one last visit." If so, it is to supervise, by remote control, a replay of his and America's Vietnam trauma.

Writer Kathy McWorter and director Jon Avnet alternate these moral mud baths with warm soaks in sentimentality. Sometimes The War is so noble you want to spank it. But as it spins fascinatingly out of control, the film is nevertheless secured by the four splendid actors who play the Simmons family. Costner, a daring actor in his narrow range, lets his voice and heart break subtly on every line. And the two kids are fine -- full of sense, discretion and what we used to call gumption.