Saturday, November 21, 2009

Honey, Can We Talk?

Movie Review:
Solaris

PG-13 / 1 hr., 39 min. / 2002

There are two kinds of science fiction on the market. There is the Sci-Fi of Technology, where computers develop brains and take over, or spaceships take us deep into unexplored galaxies, or time travel takes us into unfathomable past or future worlds. And there is the Sci-Fi of Idea, where man delves into the philosophical implications of a newly developed technology or a strange new life force.

Most sci-fi movies will include both of these forms in their structure, to varying degrees. The classic sci-fi tales used the Technology aspect as a way of exploring the Idea aspect, such as the way H.G. Wells used time travel to parabolically examine modern society and its trends in The Time Machine; or Jules Verne’s postulations on the possibilities to be gleaned from the ocean floor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

As our culture becomes more immune to the desire to actually think, we have shifted over to sci-fi that is concerned almost exclusively with the Technology and couldn’t care less about the Idea. The Star Wars franchise, while entertaining, is little more than standard mythology retold using Jedi knights, hyperdrives, light sabers, and Wookies. Fun, but check your brains at the door.

This new mentality so exemplifies the meaning of science fiction to most people that it is no wonder they were sorely disappointed by Solaris. There are no explosions. There are no robots. There are no drooling, multi-tentacled, carnivorous aliens. The technology of the one space ship involved is barely even given a passing glance. This is a film that is entirely concerned with the Idea.

There is a spacecraft circling the gaseous planet Solaris, and apparently something unusual is taking place on board. Such is the vague gist of the message that crew member Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) sends down to his friend Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychological counselor on earth. Gibarian’s message asks Kelvin to join him on the spacecraft, and in an effort to escape some painful memories, Kelvin accepts.

Arriving on board the ship, Kelvin is immediately struck by two things: The ship’s apparent vacancy, and splotches of blood on the walkways. After some searching, Kelvin finds two crew members: Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis). Both seem rather disturbed over undefined strange occurrences, not the least of which appears to be Gibarian’s suicide which took place sometime after he sent his message to Kelvin.

Now here’s my problem: On the one hand, if I describe any more of the plot, I will deprive you of the thrill of letting it unfold for itself as you watch. On the other hand, this tack will make it very difficult to discuss the film at all. On the third hand, I’m not sure “thrill” is the right word for describing the film anyway, so further plot revelations may not have anything to ruin. But I’ll play it safe and discuss only what I can.

Solaris is based on the book by Stanislaw Lem, and this is its second incarnation as a film. This adaptation is written and directed by Steven Soderbergh, whose previous works involved a great deal of action and high-stakes tension, so the extraordinarily calm delivery here is something of a surprise. But in general terms, Soderbergh handles it well, guiding us slowly into the depths of the story with long scenes that are visually static but emotionally dynamic.

But it is this snail’s pace that will kill the film for most people. I will not be so phony as to say the pace didn’t bother me at all, but I had heard going in that this was not a whiz-bang action piece, so I was braced for it. Even then, I occasionally lapsed into mental ruminations on other things I could be doing; but as a dedicated film student I got all the way to the end credits.

Why so slow? Because, once again, this is a film about the Idea. And the nature of the Sci-Fi of the Idea is that people sit around exploring the Idea. Aside from flashbacks to earlier scenes in Kelvin’s life, much of the film is Kelvin and a woman named Rheya (Natascha McElhone) dealing with the implications of an Idea that the ship’s crew discovers while circling Solaris. The single longest shot in the movie is of Kelvin and Rheya lying in bed simply talking. (This is also the George Clooney butt-shot scene everyone warned me about, but my thirteen-inch TV screen rendered it only mildly painful to the eyes.)

Within that slowness, the cast delivers a satisfactory performance. George Clooney (Ocean’s Eleven), Natascha McElhone (The Truman Show), Viola Davis (Antwone Fisher), and Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan) all demonstrate ample skill in delivering on an emotionally charged subject – although Davies, as a stoner techie, grows very annoying very quickly. Maybe it’s a tribute to his talent, but I was ready to slap him and tell him just to shut up.

In general, everything successfully contributes to the unity of the production, a feat too many sloppier efforts fail to achieve. In Solaris, the exploration of the Idea is the important thing, so the production design by Philip Messina, costumes by Melina Canonero, and music score by Cliff Martinez are kept appropriately unobtrusive. The score is almost atmospheric, filling the silence with minimalism but never presenting a melody to distract us from the proceedings. The director even fills out the crew with a minimalist mentality: The editing and cinematography are handled by Soderbergh himself under various pseudonyms.

Despite its professionalism, I was somewhat disappointed with the film for a handful of reasons, the first of which is the promotional paragraph on the DVD box. I am growing increasingly tired of inaccurate material designed to lure me into renting something, because inevitably I end up frustrated by the disconnect between what the material leads me to expect and what I actually get.

For Solaris, I was promised a ship filled with bizarre occurrences, something akin to Sphere, perhaps, only a little more thought-provoking. Anyone planning to view this film should ignore that promise, because whoever wrote the DVD sleeve material is lying. What we get is one bizarre occurrence; it is played out several times and in slightly different forms, but it is foundationally the same event repeated. This is not in itself a problem, but it is not what I was led to expect.

A similar comment could be made regarding the film’s first act. The blood splattered around the ship when Kelvin arrives inadvertently promises us something much more dangerous and tense than what we actually get.

Second, the pace could have been tightened a bit without jeopardizing the film’s theme or style. Some shots feel interminable, some of the actors’ meaningful pauses feel too long. I am not advocating wholesale surrender to the fast, choppy editing that is a poor substitute for true cinematic energy; but a general rule is to show what you need to show for as long as you need to show it, then move on. Soderbergh ignores this too often in Solaris.

And third, even a story about an Idea needs some forward momentum. It does not need to involve lasers and haywire robots and Sigourney Weaver blowing up screeching, snarling, deadly life forms. But there should be something requiring the characters to advance the story. Solaris contains no such thing except Kelvin’s increasingly conflicted feelings about the Idea. This can be very successful in a novel, and I imagine the book’s exploration of Kelvin’s thoughts makes for an interesting study. But ultimately, those thought processes do not translate into a consistently enthralling cinematic experience.

But surprisingly, for a film that feels so slow, I feel that the Idea we are presented with is not discussed enough. The film’s 99-minute running time makes any truly deep exploration of the Idea impossible. We are left with a Cliff Notes view of a philosophical dilemma.

The story has a few potential elements of momentum already present in its structure, but fails to make use of them. One such element presents itself within the last ten minutes of the film, but could have added just a dash of tension and urgency if it had been mentioned somewhere around the halfway point instead.

Despite half my review being criticisms, I’m giving the film an above-average rating. It is a good film, and I am, ultimately, glad that my friend Jason recommended it. I think its biggest problem is simply that it had the misfortune of being presented to a public that has long since distanced itself from thought-provoking cinema.

My Score: 8

Monday, November 9, 2009

How the West Was Weird

Movie Review:
Dead Man

R / 2 hrs., 1 min. / 1996

I’d like to get inside Jim Jarmusch’s head. Or maybe I wouldn’t; I’m not sure. His neo-Western tale Dead Man is just bizarre enough that maybe I don’t want to know what he was thinking. The film is unusual, in the sense that a person can suddenly feel unusual stomach cramps or experience unusual pain in unusual places.

William “Bill” Blake (Johnny Depp) arrives by train at the western town of Machine where he has been hired to be an accountant for a metalworks shop. But he is informed twice, the second time at gunpoint, that due to his delay in reaching the town, another accountant has been hired.

Although jobless and nearly penniless, Blake’s gentlemanly nature earns him the attention of a saloon girl (Mili Avital) who takes him to bed, where they are discovered by her former fiancĂ© (Gabriel Byrne) who promptly takes aim and kills the girl. Blake returns fire in self-defense, and manages by the third shot to fatally hit the man. Blake flees the scene in fear, leaving the townspeople to believe that he heartlessly killed both people.

Tired, wounded, and delirious, Blake is befriended by “Nobody” (Gary Farmer), an outcast Indian who once had a proper English education and therefore mistakes Blake for the poet of the same name. “Nobody” becomes Blake’s guide, both geographically and spiritually, leading him to an unknown destination that could be either real or mythical.

Somewhere behind Blake, three bounty hunters (Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, and Eugene Byrd) track him, along with regional law officers and, unofficially, a missionary (Alfred Molina). As Blake becomes more familiar with a gun and the body count rises, the price on Blake’s head rises as well.

As outlined here on my word processor, this sounds like a really good treatment for a movie. I can imagine anyone from Lawrence Kasdan to Kevin Costner swooping down with a sack of money to option the script. But don’t be fooled: There is a great chasm between the potentially exciting tale outlined here and Jarmusch’s particular vision that created the actual product. For my money, I’d like to see the version Jarmusch didn’t make.

The problem does not lie in Jarmusch’s technical abilities to manufacture a film. Shot in black and white with an A-list cast, the film is well assembled. I would not have thought of Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands) to appear in a western setting, but once he’s in costume, he looks satisfactorily like an east coast rube trying to impress the west coast frontiersmen. Depp is a talented actor who can turn himself into almost anything, as evidenced by his long list of eccentric characters: Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Cpt. Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, and Willy Wonka, to name a few. For all his talent, here Depp plays Blake as, well, Depp. Depp in a plaid suit. While that may work, I find it hard to believe Depp didn’t find any quirks, tics, or backstory to use in enhancing Blake into something more memorable.

The supporting characters, including Gary Farmer (Adaptation), Crispin Glover (Twister), Lance Henriksen (Super Mario Bros.), Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade), and the great Robert Mitchum (Night of the Hunter), are all acclaimed character actors. They inhabit this film as somewhat bent interpretations of personalities from classic westerns. Glover and Thornton in particular perform with a unique edge to their characters that renders them slightly surreal and rather intriguing, albeit befuddling.

Jarmusch also successfully creates his mood, which is definitely moody. The film is not about chase scenes and gun fights; it proceeds slowly and deliberately on its journey, concerned more with atmosphere than action.

There is the lengthy confinement in a railway car, the sprawling vistas of the untamed West, the mesmerizing forests of beech trees. The metal foundry is bleak, junky, labyrinthine, and populated with stringy old men. The whole scene feels like the brainchild of Terry Gilliam. Jarmusch takes full advantage of these elements to create a solid sense of isolation and melancholy. But the question remains: To what good purpose? Or even, to what purpose at all?

This is the overarching problem. I reached the end of the film and had no clue what I was supposed to take from it. Or even if I was supposed to take something from it. I feel similarly clueless with anything Robert Redford directs, but at least with Redford’s films I do feel like he’s trying to tell me something, even if I don’t get it. With Dead Man, I really didn’t even get the sense that there was a message to find at all, though common sense tells me you don’t invest months of your life and a bucket-load of money in something that has no purpose whatsoever.

The film is a collection of oddities that are interesting on their own, but do not contribute to a cohesive whole. The opening scene on a train is not only interminable, but inexplicable. We fade in and out several times as Blake treks across the country. In each new sub-scene, the train is peopled with an entirely new set of characters. Is Blake dreaming? Is he already dead and this film is going to be a metaphor? Or is it just that the train stops at stations and lets on new passengers during each blackout? Although the third answer seems most likely, Jarmusch provides no clues and leaves us doing double-takes.

Before the train ride ends, the engineer played by Crispin Glover comes in, sits down by Blake, and provides the film’s first line of dialogue: “Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you’re in the boat, and then later that night you’re lying looking up at the ceiling and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?” If a train engineer, or any stranger for that matter, took a seat next to me and said that line, and said it with the strange tone of voice that Glover uses, I would be looking for the nearest police officer. This opening does not bode well for the film. But I shrugged off the worries and prepared myself for something a bit skewed.

And skewed it is: Parts of the film feel almost as if Jarmusch were a disciple of the Coen brothers. In particular I think of Blake’s encounter with three fur trappers, including Billy Bob Thornton’s character. The set-up and delivery of the scene is off-kilter, like something Joel Coen would direct. But it’s too weird. Coen characters have a rational eccentricity, if such a paradox is possible. The three fur traders are just odd: One wears a dress, they quote portions of the Bible that don’t relate to anything, and they have a fascination with Blake’s hair, none of which comes together for any definable reason. Unless it has something to do with that portion of the conversation in which the fur traders argue over which of them gets to “do” Blake, which in context could either mean kill him or sexually assault him; I couldn’t quite tell.

On top of all of this, the film is thoroughly marred by its music score. But calling the solo electric guitar that accompanies the entire film a music score is like slapping a giant glove to the collective faces of John Williams, Danny Elfman, and the entire Hollywood and independent film scoring community. Even no music score at all would have been more musical.

So what is the answer? Perhaps the shooting star outside the saloon girl’s room has something to tell us. Or the dead fawn Blake falls asleep next to. Or the lightning bolts “Nobody” paints on Blake’s face.

Perhaps it is in the references to the poet William Blake. “Nobody” quotes Blake’s poetry frequently, and at what seem to be relevant moments, but the relevance escapes me. I wonder if knowing more about the real William Blake would help. I grabbed a few things from Wikipedia to see what could be learned:

“Blake was an important proponent of imagination as the modern western world currently defines the word. His belief that humanity could overcome the limitations of its five senses is perhaps one of Blake’s greatest legacies. His words, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,’ were seen as bizarre at the time, but are now accepted as part of our modern definition of imagination.”

And this: “George Richmond gives the following account of Blake’s death: ‘He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.’”

While all of this is very informative in its own right, I’m not sure Dead Man has become any more clear to me. William Blake wrote: “Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.” I can point those people out to you: They’re the ones who sat through this movie.

My Score: 4

Thursday, November 5, 2009

When Life Gives You Lemony

Movie Review:
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

PG / 1 hr., 47 min / 2004

The danger in getting extremely excited about an upcoming movie is that one might end up over-anticipating, so that the film, once finally viewed, ends up being not really a bad film, but a disappointment in relative terms. Such was my case with Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I absolutely loved the theatrical trailer, which presents a movie I very much wanted to see (despite having never read a word from Mr. Snicket’s typewriter). But once I saw the feature, I felt a little let down.

The film is based on the first three books of the series – The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window – which follow the unfortunate tale of the Baudelaire children: Violet, the inventive oldest sister (Emily Browning); Klaus, the bookworm (Liam Aiken); and Sunny, the two-year old biter (alternately Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman). These three are suddenly rendered orphans when a fire burns their house to the ground with their parents in it (all of which is off-screen so your tots won’t be horrified within the first five minutes). The family banker, Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall), takes the children to live with their closest relative, the eccentric – and, we soon discover, sinister – Count Olaf (Jim Carrey).

Olaf makes no charade to disguise his real reason for accepting the orphans: He wants the Baudelaire fortune. But since the fortune will not pass to the guardian until the wards die, Olaf sets out to kill them. This is, of course, a dark theme, and one which I would not rush to display before children, although the theater I was in was heavily laden with impressionable youngsters. If there’s a plus side, it’s that the dark themes of this movie are much more subtle than, for instance, Addams Family Values, in which Wednesday and Pugsley commit flagrantly fatal acts upon their newest sibling – and that theater was also filled with impressionable youngsters. Do parents not think anymore? But this is a tangent.

When Olaf’s plan to have the children killed by locking them in a car parked on the railroad tracks fails, Mr. Poe removes them from his custody – not because Olaf tried to kill them, but because he left the youngest, Sunny, in the driver’s seat unattended. Neither Mr. Poe nor any other adults in the film seem to believe the children when they tattle on their uncle.

The second foster parent is Monty Montgomery (Billy Connolly), a reptilian expert, who plans to pack the children off to Peru on a little adventure – until Count Olaf shows up disguised as a fellow scientist. I’m not spoiling anything by pointing out that it is indeed Olaf in disguise, because, although the make-up job is quite good, the children announce it is Olaf just seconds after seeing him. Once again, the dim-witted adult (what is the movie trying to say here?) doesn’t believe the children for a moment. I am not of the extreme view that adults should believe and side with every fancy that a child spurts forth, but I think the grown-ups in the film could have been made a little more sympathetic and/or intelligent.

The third foster home involves Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) who lives practically over the sea, in a shanty that juts out off a high cliff, supported by a rickety collection of beams. There is a comic irony here, because the aunt herself is paranoid about everything (“Don’t get too close to the refrigerator – it might fall and crush you!”). Oh, and Olaf shows up in disguise. I get the idea this is the format of each book in the entire series.

The plot is somewhat episodic this way, given that it comes from three volumes in an ever-expanding series of books. But I do not feel this is a flaw. Momentum is successfully maintained throughout the stor(ies), and it feels like a coherent whole despite its derivation from multiple sources.

I am always hesitant when a film has Jim Carrey cast in anything but a normal human role. He does human well (The Truman Show, The Majestic). When he is given unrestrained freedom, he is unbearable (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). However, and this is important, when his manic personality has a reason for existing, he can be delightful (The Mask). Here, Olaf is a decidedly overboard and terrible actor, so Carrey is an appropriate choice. But he is actually more entertaining, I think, when he is playing Olaf in disguise. His Italian scientist and his Irish sailor are intriguing to study as he performs them.

The relative newcomers as the Baudelaire children are adequate, given that the script does not place them in highly demanding situations. The script and director even seem to have deliberately removed opportunities for Miss Browning and Mr. Aiken to really act, such as in the scene where they learn of their parents’ deaths and simply stare at Mr. Poe standing on the beach.

Billy Connolly (Timeline) and Meryl Streep (Death Becomes Her) seem to have fun in their supporting roles. Both are eccentric and amusing caricatures, Aunt Josephine more so than Uncle Monty. Streep must have been exhausted after every take – she is constantly jittery. For a bonus chuckle, watch her pince-nez: They bounce on her nose as if they are spring-loaded.

Other actors are not on screen enough to be noticed, really, which is a shame, because Timothy Spall (Nicholas Nickleby), Jennifer Coolidge (Best in Show), and Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice, Home Alone) are such talented and entertaining performers. And movie-goers familiar with Jane Lynch (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind) will get a kick out of her three-second cameo.

Academy-Award winner Rick Heinrichs (Sleepy Hollow) is responsible for the production design, and earned another Oscar nomination because of it. Under his artistic eye, the entire look of the film is excellent, a fantasy world evoking the same visual enjoyment I got out of the Harry Potter movies, and anything directed by Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton (a friend of Heinrichs’). Olaf’s house is a ghoulish run-down gothic mansion with carved eyes in several niches and sconces; the countryside is a depressing brown haze; the lakeside town is almost a painting.

And now to the disappointments, the largest of which are what I perceive to be anachronisms, elements out of place for the time and setting. Although the story is apparently set in a fairly contemporary Boston, the film looks and feels like a fantasy version of pre-war England, a notion that the British accents of Mssrs. Spall and Jude Law (Closer) had cemented in my mind not five minutes into the production. I was led to expect something old-fashioned and highly stylized. While this is largely achieved, director Brad Silberling allows a significant number of slips, in things like Carrey’s occasional use of modern lingo (“Let’s cast this puppy!”) in amongst his more grandiose verbal gestures, the presence of a Chrysler Imperial (and an ugly one at that), and Cedric the Entertainer as a police inspector. Certainly no racial offense intended, but Cedric’s very African-American voice simply does not fit the aura created by the other elements of the film. Neither does Olaf’s consuming a beverage from a fast-food paper cup. I could go on.

I suspect these elements are not so much the slips I accuse them of being, but rather evidence that Silberling simply failed to solidify the rules under which his fictional world would function. In the end, these inconsistencies do nothing except wrench us unexpectedly out of the setting that was so beautifully established in the opening few minutes.

The score by Thomas Newman takes some getting used to. I like the riff he employs when Uncle Monty enters the Reptile Room and again when Aunt Josephine opens her Wide Window, but overall the film cries out for the comic menace of either Danny Elfman or Alan Silvestri (Mouse Hunt – what a beautiful Main Title Theme). Very little of the score stands out as anything appreciable; I think the best moment is the musical number, “Loverly Spring,” right at the beginning. And Newman’s composition for the closing credits is just plain wrong – horribly out of place, like the Imperial and Cedric.

I have a natural love for wonderfully fantastic tales set in somewhat off-kilter worlds, especially as viewed through the eyes of a child. I think of the works of Roald Dahl, John Bellairs, and the tales of Dr. Seuss. From what I saw in this film, the works of Lemony Snicket could be added to the list – his stories carry all the necessary ingredients to make the kind of film I could positively drool over. But this first entry, in what I hope will be an ever-improving series, feels a little undercooked. Which is unfortunate.

My Score: 7

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sleeping Beauties

Movie Review:
Coma

PG / 1 hr., 53 min. / 1978

When you’re selecting reading material for an extended stay in the hospital, make sure you do not bring anything by Robin Cook. As a former medical professional, Cook found his niche in the specialized genre of the Medical Thriller. In fact, he may have even been the genre’s creator. In his books, heinous crimes are committed upon the helpless patients strapped to surgical tables and ambulance gurneys, often by the hospital personnel themselves. Once you’ve finished a Cook novel, you’ll never look at your nurse the same again.

Based on one of Cook’s earlier efforts, the film Coma is about Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold), physician at a major hospital, whose life is thrown into upheaval when one of her best friends comes in for surgery and fails to revive after the procedure. She remains in an inexplicable coma, and Wheeler wants to find the medical explanation.

When a second patient suffers a similar fate, Wheeler becomes convinced that something is not right. An unauthorized look into the hospital records reveals that a total of a dozen such cases have occurred within the past year, a failure rate that is suspiciously high.

But Wheeler is hampered at all turns. Her boyfriend Dr. Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas) thinks her claims of a sinister plot are irrational; the head of anaesthesiology (Rip Torn) rankles at her insinuation that his department may be to blame; and her supervisor Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark) threatens her with dismissal if she persists in violating hospital policy to solve the puzzle.

I had originally intended to spell out more of the plot, but that would deflate the suspense and fun of watching it unfold. In short, Wheeler is determined to find out why so many comas are occurring at the hospital, and her quest becomes increasingly harrowing.

Cook’s novel is brought to the screen by Michael Crichton, whose own novels are excellent tales of suspense and often nail-biting terror – even though they all end with the usual violent explosion that destroys whatever the problem was. My wife has read Coma and informs me that Crichton’s script adaptation is reasonably faithful, cutting or combining characters only to keep the film from sprawling out over an entire evening. And to convey the many technical medical concepts present in the book, Crichton inserts medical interns into the scenes where there were none in the book. This enables the doctors to explain everything out loud and thus Crichton makes sure the viewing audience doesn’t get lost in all the terminology.

I write a full thirty years after the film was released in theaters, and it does have a somewhat dated feeling. But it still holds up, thanks to Crichton’s skilled directing, which is remarkably captivating considering that it was only his third effort at the time. Just as Steven Spielberg demonstrated with Duel, Crichton has a respectable grasp of generating suspense using ordinary people in ordinary places. With no dinosaurs, killer apes, or alien spheres, Crichton takes a very common woman and puts her in an increasingly tense mystery. If you can look past the film stock quality, hairstyles, and a slightly slower pace than later thrillers, you’ll find a film as gripping as anything being produced today.

French-Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold (Dead Ringers) brings a nice combination of vulnerability and resolution to her role. She is not brashly unstoppable, but neither is she spineless in her efforts to unearth the truth. Her accent takes a little getting used to, but it is only a minor hurdle to our enjoyment of the story.

I had forgotten that Michael Douglas (The China Syndrome) was once a young man, but there he is. I think he’s gotten better with age, but he plays his role acceptably here. In a twist probably inspired by the feminism of the 1970's, he finds himself with the role of “nagging wife” that so many Hollywood actresses normally end up in – not a lot to do except alternately encourage and rebuke the Main Character.

The film is peopled with names that have grown to become stars, including Rip Torn (Men in Black), Tom Selleck (Three Men and a Baby), and Ed Harris (The Truman Show). Not that any of their performances blew me away; it was just a kick to see these now-prominent actors in their formative stages. Torn and Harris in particular are so young here I didn’t recognize either of them at first glance.

In watching a thriller of any type, we expect to be drawn to the edges of our seats, and Coma generally succeeds. There are at least three suspenseful set pieces, the most famous of which is Wheeler’s escape from the Jefferson Institute, the medical auxiliary that cares for the hospital’s coma victims. Crichton’s envisioning of Cook’s futuristic tale produces the film’s classic image: Bodies in tranquil repose, suspended several feet off the floor and bathed in eerie shades of light. And the Institute’s administrator, Mrs. Emerson (Elizabeth Ashley), doesn’t lighten the mood any, with her impersonation of a Stepford wife in a nurse’s uniform.

Overall, the film’s only significant weaknesses are due to its age. Portions of the acting, lighting, editing, and music are slightly less polished than if the film were made today. But then, if the film were made today, the producers would also want to put in language, sex, and gore that really wouldn’t enhance the story one bit, nor make it more suspenseful. It is strong as it is. (Miss Bujold does, however, display some nudity in a couple of scenes, and it is clear that she lives with someone not her husband. The film would probably earn a PG-13 rating today.)

I could delve further into this critique, but I would run the risk of revealing details that are more fun simply to experience as they unfold. In short, while I’ve never heard anyone describe Coma as a “classic,” it is well worth the viewing, plain and simple. Grab the popcorn and turn down the lights. Just don’t let the nurse take you into surgery afterwards.

My Score: 8