LOST LOVERS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In Italy in 1918, in a relatively quiet corner of World War I, a 19-year-old American ambulance driver is wounded. In the hospital he falls in love with a pretty nurse. They have a brief affair, which she ends rather abruptly with a Dear John letter.

A fairly standard-issue wartime liaison, in short, of no consequence to anyone but its participants--except that it really happened to Ernest Hemingway. And he transformed it (and the rest of his Italian experiences) into some of his most memorable and poignant fiction. Drawing in part on a recently discovered diary of his inamorata, Agnes Von Kurowsky, Richard Attenborough and a squad of writers attempt to penetrate to the truth of the tale in In Love and War. They get lost in that no-man's-land where so many biopics come to grief: trying to stay in touch with historical fact, yet eager to convert an intimate romance into something more sweeping and epic.

They are not much helped by Chris O'Donnell as the writer manque. There is no danger in him. You don't for a minute believe that his "kid" (as Agnes, who was seven years older, called him) is going to grow up to be our macho-crazed Papa. On the other hand, Sandra Bullock is just lovely as Agnes. Their difference in ages bothered her, but you also get a sense of a woman tasting freedom for the first time, wanting to keep all her options for adventure, romantic and otherwise, open--and sensing, more clearly than he did, that her lover needed to do the same. There's a truthfulness, an allure, in her ambivalences that comes close to saving a film careless with facts but dutiful to movie cliches.

--By Richard Schickel