Colin Firth as Robert Lawrence

Cable's A&E has come up with the perfect movie for Memorial Day weekend: "Tumbledown," a searing docudrama about Robert Lawrence, a 22-year-old lieutenant in the British army's elite Scots Guard regiment. Lawrence was severely wounded during the Falkland Islands conflict between Great Britain and Argentina.

Charles Wood wrote the script for this movie, for which Lawrence served as adviser. It's a kind of British version of "Born on the Fourth of July," with the Falklands substituting for Vietnam. Like that film, "Tumbledown" is about one soldier's disillusionment with war.

Wood's script skips back and forth between past and present, but Richard Eyre's direction is so skillful that this never becomes confusing or annoying. Wood saves the big battle scenes for the movie's final moments, making Lawrence's struggles to recover from his emotional and physical injuries, which we've already seen, that much more poignant and powerful.

Colin Firth gives an outstanding performance as Lawrence; his ability to create Lawrence at various stages in the story - and to make it immediately clear what the state of his physical and emotional health is at that moment - strengthens Wood's script.

We see, at various times, Lawrence as a brash young hellion and gung-ho leader in the Scots Guard; Lawrence near death on the battlefield; Lawrence as a rebellious patient nearly overwhelmed by trying to regain control of his life; Lawrence as the recovering but still bitter military man for whom soldiering was everything.

Wood's script contrasts media coverage and the government's glorification of British soldiers in the Falklands war with the suffering experienced by wounded soldiers and their anger at everyone's inability, civilian and military, to fully understand their feelings.

"Tumbledown" is more a collage of expressions than a continuous story, although Lawrence's injuries are the theme that connects it all, a collage of great but brief scenes: Wounded soldiers in a ward watching, expressionless, TV coverage of a service where the royal family honors the soldiers; the contrasts between the pomp and circumstance of the peacetime army and the ugliness of actual warfare; a reunion with his former girlfriend; the understated mixture of pride and pain on the face of Lawrence's father (beautifully played by David Calder); and razor-sharp cameos of various nurses, doctors, physical therapists and psychiatrists with whom Lawrence comes in contact.

In one scene, the father of his best friend is fascinated by war and war memorabilia but admits to being a coward: " I collect," he tells Lawrence, "but I don't do - like the rest of the country." Another memorable scene finds Lawrence being interviewed by an army researcher on what it feels like to kill!