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