Posted: 03/08/2002

Dragonfly

(2002)

by Joe Steiff

The writer/director of Ace Venutra: Pet Detective and The Nutty Professor tries to make a supernatural drama. Huh?

Written by David Seltzer and Brandon Camp & Mike Thompson and based on a story by Camp and Thompson, Dragonfly is the latest directorial outing of Tom Shadyac, who has cast the likes of Linda Hunt and Kathy Bates in minor roles and Kevin Costner as the lead. The last half of the previous sentence speaks volumes about the kind of experience you will have as an audience member.

Though to be fair, Dragonfly has some nicely done elements, not the least of which is a satisfying ending. The screenwriters have set up enough information that you can figure out the ending, while at the same time for most of us the ending is a surprise: the mixture of “aha” and “of course” that a good ending provides. It’s the journey to the ending that some may find a bit lacking and a bit illogical.

Dragonfly falls within the realm of ghost story that is less about scares (though there are a couple of jump-in-your-seat kinds of moments) than creating an atmosphere and a mystery.

Joe Darrow, an emergency room doctor, is wracked with grief over the loss of his more socially conscious wife (Susanna Thompson). Also a doctor, Emily Darrow’s work has centered on young cancer patients, and at the start of the film, she is involved in a bus accident while on a humanitarian mission to the jungles of Venezuela. The fact that her body is never found leads to a certain hope that perhaps she has survived, and in fact, this is one of the better-handled aspects of the story, sustaining just enough wishful thinking while avoiding outright implausibility. Seltzer, Camp and Thompson lavish all of their implausibility in other areas.

Having long neglected his promise to check in on her patients while she was away, Joe finally gets around to going to her ward, seemingly surprised that 6 months after his promise many of her cancer patients are, uh, no longer available to check in on. However, a couple of them remain, and they seem to have encountered Emily in their dreams or near death experiences. At first these can be dismissed as simply their own grief reactions. But when children who never met Emily enter the ward and seem to know Joe by name, things get a bit spookier. With several of the patients telling Joe that Emily is trying to reach him, Joe is forced to consider the possibility that she is contacting him from the grave. The question is, what is she trying to say?

And here’s where the story’s logic becomes illogical and the whole film drags a bit as Joe Darrow proves to be one of the dimmest bulbs in the box. One wonders why he never talked with his white-water friends about the squiggly cross shape that he begins to see everywhere (and that the children on the ward begin drawing prolifically). It doesn’t help that he’s played by Kevin Costner. Rather than figuring out if there’s life after death, maybe someone should figure out if Kevin Costner can act. Oops. I guess the answer to that is already apparent.

Linda Hunt’s nun is the most interesting character here and actually has an interesting story; unfortunately she only has 5 minutes to convey it. Will most audience members even realize that Kathy Bates is playing a lesbian? Doesn’t matter because she proves to be a dim bulb as well, sort of the short-handed version of Scully’s season-after-season skepticism despite all the evidence to the contrary.

When all is said and done, Dragonfly is nothing much more than an average episode of PAX Television’s Mysterious Ways. In fact, if Dragonfly were an hour television episode it would have a much better chance of being as good as all those adjectives typed across the movie’s newspaper ads imply. As it is, the film’s primary interest for me is that it serves as potential evidence of a pet theory of mine.

Over the years, I’ve been struck by what seems to be a slight proliferation at the turn of each decade of films that express a certain Transitional Anxiety. In effect, these films serve as reassurance that there is something more to the world around us than what we can see - in other words, occult in the truest sense of the word. Perhaps these are our culture’s expression of “doomsday” fears, when people turn to thoughts of whether or not there is some form of life after death. Films like 1980’s Resurrection immediately come to mind. Or as the 80s turned into the 90s, films like Jacob’s Ladder and Ghost.

Our current transition (1998-2002) has seemingly delivered more than our fair share of Transitional Anxiety films (After Life, The Sixth Sense, The Others, Dragonfly, Soul Survivor…). Perhaps that’s not so surprising what with it being not just the turn of a decade, but the turn of a century and a millennium as well. Now granted, there was a time when this reassurance was actually provocative and complex (1968-1972 saw the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris). Maybe Ghost’s Academy Award Nomination for Best Picture is where we began sliding into more mindless speculations. But even a film as flawed as Dragonfly resonates at some level with these deeper questions. Maybe the problem (or at least the difference) is that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris were more interested in the questions, and films like Dragonfly are more interested in (pat) answers.

Either way, Dragonfly suffers from its casting and illogical story developments; if you really want reassurance that there’s a world beyond ours, watch TV’s Crossing Over. If you want to filmicly ponder the nature of our existence, rent After Life. And if you just want a good ghost story, rent The Sixth Sense.

Joe Steiff teaches Critical Studies, Film Production and Screenwriting at Columbia College Chicago and is always looking for more examples to round out his Transitional Anxiety.

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