FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Henderson (Stephen Dillane) knows the drill: check into the best hotel still standing in some chaotic corner of the world; sally forth each day with your cameraman to gather images of anonymous suffering that will, ironically, make you famous to television viewers around the globe; beat it back to the journalists' bar each night to swap war stories with your colleagues.

It's a life that can be made to look dashing--you know, the trench-coated stand-upper with the rubble of some dreadful, war-torn landscape stretching out behind the minor media star. It's also a life that can begin to seem feckless--you know, the endless trafficking in scenes of human misery that, no matter how widely they are broadcast, do nothing to halt the flow of tragedy

Welcome to Sarajevo is painfully alert to this bitter contradiction. You read it first in Dillane's wary eyes, the weary set of his shoulders, the willed affectlessness of his voice. His Henderson is based on a real British TV journalist named Michael Nicholson, who covered 15 wars in 25 years, and the actor carries the weight of that experience, the need somehow to shift it, most affectingly.

It begins with his determination to make the struggles of an orphanage the center of his coverage. This is not, by the standards of TV, a very sexy story--not compared with carnage in the streets--but he sticks with it. Before he quite realizes what he's doing, Henderson is adopting Emira (played by Emira Nusevic, herself a child of the war), getting her out of the country via a terrifying bus ride through country controlled by Serb guerrillas, then voluntarily, dangerously returning to Sarajevo a year later to complete legal adoption, ensuring that she never has to make this return journey.

This could have turned out to be an exercise in easy sentiment, easy to shrug off. But Frank Cottrell Boyce's script is carefully understated, and director Michael Winterbottom has achieved a remarkably seamless blend of fictional and factual footage. You gain from their work--and from a wonderfully real cast that includes Woody Harrelson--a very powerful impression of a population trying to maintain the small comforts of quotidian routines, common civility, as the only available defense against the surrounding anarchy. And you begin to see the goodness of Henderson's deed not as a carefully considered moral act but as a rather desperate improvisation, an instinctive gesture he needs to make in order to assure his survival as a fully human being. He is surprised, puzzled by his own grace under pressure. The movie, in turn, respects his mystery, and by its refusal of glib inspirationalism earns our emotionally profound regard.