Movie Review: Dragonfly (2002)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Tom Shadyac  

Starring: Kevin Costner, Kathy Bates, Linda Hunt, Susanna Thompson  

Running Time: 104 minutes  

Synopsis: Chicago-area surgeon Dr. Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) is still grieving the death of his wife Emily (Susanna Thompson). She was a doctor dedicated to field service, and died while pregnant in a South American conflict zone. Emily had a dragonfly birthmark, and Joe starts experiencing supernatural episodes involving dragonflies. He visits the hospital's oncology ward, where two children report encounters with Emily during near-death experiences. Joe's colleague Dr. Dickinson (Ron Rifkin) and neighbour Miriam (Kathy Bates) worry about his mental health as he becomes increasingly certain Emily is sending him an important message.

What Works Well: The sense of mystery wrapped in fantasy, grief, and secrets of the afterlife is compelling. Joe's journey from non-believer in heaven to a forced reckoning with spirituality is careful and deliberate, propelled by deep love and sudden loss. Director Tom Shadyac creates a path filled with quiet and small but telling supernatural moments, none of them obvious but all of them contributing to a mounting sense of intrigue. 

What Does Not Work As Well: The mood is overwhelming morose, and Kevin Costner wallows in Joe's caustic bereavement. The supporting cast is talented but given relatively little to do, to the extent that Joe's pet parrot emerges as the most memorable co-star. The final act changes gears and locations abruptly, swapping subtlety for adventure and abandoning the earned surroundings of Joe's life in favour of a whole different environment.  

Key Quote:

Miriam (to Joe): Take down the vacancy that says "Emily's ghost is welcome here". You got to do the hard stuff. Got to clean out closets and get on with your life without her.



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The Movies Of Linda Hunt

All movies starring Linda Hunt and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)

Dune (1984)

Silverado (1985)

Kindergarten Cop (1990)

Dragonfly (2002)

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)

A drama and romance, The Year Of Living Dangerously enjoys the tense setting of a foreign country on a knife's edge, but sacrifices much of its political intrigue in favour of a trite romance.

It's 1965, and Australian Broadcasting Service journalist Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) arrives in Jakarta on his first foreign assignment to cover rising tensions in Indonesia, where President Sukarno is whipping up anti-Western sentiments and fending off Communist threats. Hamilton socializes uneasily with other veteran foreign correspondents, and establishes a working relationship with local fixer and cameraman Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt).

With Billy's help Guy secures a coveted interview with the communist party leader, and then meets Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), the assistant to British military attache Colonel Henderson (Bill Kerr). A romance starts to blossom between Jill and Guy, while tensions rise in the country with rumours of an arms build-up and impending coup, and Billy grows increasingly disillusioned with the Sukarno regime.

Two stories vie for attention within The Year Of Living Dangerously, and ultimately director Peter Weir opts to maximize the romance elements between the naive journalist and sophisticated government agent. An argument can be made that with two alluring and photogenic stars in Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver at his disposal Weir made the right choice.

But this is also an opportunity wasted, because the film invests heavily in a sense of place wracked by political uncertainty, and the setting is wasted on what transforms into a pretty traditional and rather unmemorable story of mutual infatuation.

The first half of the film is better. Adapting the book by Christopher Koch, Weir carefully creates an Indonesia beset by poverty and governed by an autocratic President losing his grip on power. With nervous soldiers at every street corner and mobs taking over the streets, Hamilton finds himself a misfit with a group of caustic journalists covering a country in the throes of unraveling.

After acclimatizing to the oppressive heat he latches on to the beguiling Billy to guide him through the political swamps. And the character of Billy, with his secret files, shadow puppets and eloquent prose, emerges as the best thing about The Year Of Living Dangerously. With Linda Hunt superb in a male role filled with complexity and self-doubt, the film occasionally threatens to break into genuinely thoughtful commentary about the third world's complex relationship with great military powers.

But Weir then shortchanges the politics and investigative journalism, as these elements become a distant backdrop to Hamilton and Jill courting each other and pondering the sense of starting a relationship when she is scheduled to shortly leave the country. For awkward periods Gibson defaults to stock angry young lover mannerisms, and the sense of menace unfortunately seeps out of the dark and hot Indonesian nights.

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Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

A dramedy with serious themes of mental stagnation and death weaved into a comic structure, Stranger Than Fiction tackles writers block, mid-life angst and the value of life within a refreshing package.

In New York City, Internal Revenue Service auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is lonely, bored and boring. He lives his life metronomically and according to strict routine. Without warning Harold starts to hear a woman's voice in his head narrating his life. Although Harold does not know this, the voice belongs to celebrated author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), and Harold is the main character in her latest attempt to write a book. Once the darling of the literary world, Karen is now suffering a serious case of writer's block and has not published for 10 years. She is struggling to find a way to kill Harold, as she does with all her main characters at the end of each book.

Harold is tasked with auditing the bakery business of Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and finds himself helplessly falling in love with Ana. But he is driven to distraction by Karen's constant stream of narration, and gets no relief from a couple of doctors (Tom Hulce and Linda Hunt). He finally turns to literature professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) for help. Together Harold and Jules start to piece together the mystery of Harold's predicament. They have to figure out if he is a character in an unfolding comedy or tragedy, and how to influence the ending.

Directed by Marc Forster, Stranger Than Fiction is smart, funny and creative, as the Lindsay Doran script deploys an innovative premise to get into the head of two intriguing characters grappling with endings and beginnings. Harold, for all practical purposes, is already dead. His life is passive and he has no meaningful connections with other people. Lacking ambition and not feeling passionate about anything, Harold is marching to an inevitable and inconspicuous ending; when and how he actually dies will be generally immaterial.

Once Harold becomes keenly aware of his own impending end, thanks to Karen's interventive narration, he is pushed out of his middle-age malaise and starts to live, and suddenly dying is a big and scary deal. Harold pursues a relationship with Ana and is forced into a friendship with a co-worker. He starts to pursue a long dormant guitar passion, changes his clothes, and stumbles onto a life mentor in Jules. Now with multiple purposes driving his existence, Harold is eager to prevent his premature death.

Karen is also going through a painful mid-life crisis and is professionally dying a slow death. Now fading from memory as a once-famous author, Karen needs to unblock her creativity, and finding a meaningful way to kill Harold will spark her revival. His death will breathe life into her career, but Karen is also struggling with the perversity of her success riding on the shoulders of the demise of all her main characters. The death that used to come easily on the written page is now a struggle, forcing Karen to ponder whether the value of life comes only at the price of death.

Will Ferrell puts his frat boy humour to one side and delivers an affecting performance as Harold. Containing himself and delivering soft humour through pathos, Ferrell demonstrates appreciated depth. Emma Thompson plays Karen as anguished and borderline depressed, while Maggie Gyllenhaal presents Ana as the anti-Harold, full of life, impulsiveness and not afraid to break the rules in small demonstrations of personal anarchy.

A bright treatment of death's place in emphasizing life, Stranger Than Fiction is an adroit confirmation of enduring human realities.

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Movie Review: Kindergarten Cop (1990)

An enjoyable light-weight thriller with large doses of pointy comedy and some low-key romance, Kindergarten Cop established Arnold Schwarzenegger as a major cross-genre star.

Detective John Kimble (Schwarzenegger) has been on the tail of psychotic drug trafficker Cullen Crisp Sr.(Richard Tyson) for a long time. Crisp, meantime, is tracking down his ex-wife Rachel who disappeared with their young son Cullen Jr. after purportedly stealing $3 million of Crisp's drug money. A tip points to Rachel hiding out in Astoria, Oregon. With Crisp temporarily locked up and fighting a murder charge, Kimble teams up with Detective Phoebe O'Hara (Pamela Reed) and they head to Astoria to try and track down Rachel before Crisp gets to her.

With Rachel living under an unknown assumed identity, Kimble inserts himself into the local elementary school as a substitute kindergarten teacher, much to the dismay of principal Schlowski (Linda Hunt), and sets about trying to identify which of the kids may be Cullen Jr. There are plenty of candidates, and as Kimble finds his feet as a teacher and learns to deal with the kids, the community warms up to him, and he starts a tentative romance with Joyce (Penelope Ann Miller), another teacher at the school. Egged on by his obsessed mother Eleanor, Crisp also makes his way to Astoria, aiming to abduct his son and take revenge on his ex-wife.

Kindergarten Cop does struggle at times to define itself. The film covers the spectrum from a demented, dangerous villain to cutesy six year old kids, passing through a fledgling romance and plenty of humour. The mix of comedy, violence and courtship is occasionally lumpy, and points to a movie perhaps trying to be too many things to too broad an audience, as Schwarzenegger strives to proactively appeal to a less macho-obsessed demographic.

Despite the film's schizophrenic personality, director Ivan Reitman is able to maintain good control. Working from a script by Murray Salem, Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris filled with sharp one-liners and some genuinely funny words coming out of the kids' mouth, Reitman delivers a zippy, entertaining film. Kindergarten Cop does not have a dull moment, with the story moving briskly to set-up the premise, Schwarzenegger having his classroom fun and courtship with Miller's schoolteacher, all leading to a dramatic climax at the school. The scenes of violence at an elementary school are relatively benign in terms of harm to kids, but remain quite disturbing in the context of more recent real events.

The scenic, almost idyllic setting in the small town of Astoria is a big plus, as is the large number of prominent roles dedicated to women. Kindergarten Cop is a welcome showcase for good and sometimes underrated actresses: Miller, Reed, Hunt, Baker, Cathy Moriarty and Jayne Brooke (the latter two as mothers who may be Rachel-in-hiding) all shine. Reed in particular demonstrates a strong spunk factor and deft comic timing as Detective O'Hara. Richard Tyson may be one dimensional as the bogeyman, but he is disturbing, and Baker as his mom reveals the destructive forces of manic mothering.

As for Schwarzenegger himself, Twins (1988) had established the potential for a range wider than pure action, and here he slips into whatever persona each individual scene requires. From kick-ass undercover cop in the opening 20 minutes to the doofus in the classroom matching wits with elementary kids, to the unsure man falling first in like then in love with a fellow teacher, Schwarzenegger demonstrates workable versatility and broadening ambition.

Kindergarten Cop graduates into grade school maybe not at the top of the class, but certainly with honours.

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