Films: 1990s
(1990) Flatliners
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Flatliners
Director: Joel Schumacher
Release: 1990
The cynical might hear the pitch: This is the "The Lost Boys" meets "St. Elmo's Fire."
Joel Schumacher does direct five beautiful people through a script that emphasizes their medical school relationships, complete with love triangle. Schumacher does soak "Flatliners" in the kind of ridiculous iconographic sets and nightclub lighting that helped make vampires the Brando-esque rebels of his fanged 1980s superhit. And, lastly, Schumacher does return to Kiefer Sutherland as his vulnerable bad boy, this time with cardiopulmonary shock pads instead of eye teeth.
But "Flatliners" is interesting, well shot and well-acted, regardless of that cynic's evaluation.
Sutherland is Nelson, a charismatic medical student attending a Renaissance cathedral of a school in Chicago, where they conduct gross anatomy classes among tower frescos and neo-Gothic architecture. He convinces his gang of top GPA classmates to conduct a simple and risky experiment.
Using their training, the plan is to clinically kill Nelson, then resuscitate him after several minutes. What he sees during that time is what he calls "exploring."
While it works, it also proves the group's undoing. Nelson begins to have violent encounters with a hooded boy from his near-death vision. Withholding that information, the rest of the group volunteers and competes for their own slot on the operating table. William Baldwin plays Joe Hurley, a womanizing heartthrob who finds his post-near-death world soaked with images from the clandestine tapes he keeps of his bedroom encounters. Kevin Bacon steps up next as David Labraccio, atheist and maverick operating room intern. He is subsequently haunted by a black girl he taunted on a childhood playground.
The morality play continues. Classmate Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts in her only genre film appearance) is the last of the group to go under. She finds her suicidal father, and he finds her, thereafter appearing in dreams and mirrors.
Finally, Oliver Platt plays straight character Randy Steckle, the Greek chorus of the film. He blusters, and records and interviews - certain that what his colleague do and see is not only wrong, but pointed towards self-destruction.
Within this construct, Schumacher and scriptwriter Peter Filardi (on his first time out) create interesting, if only partially realized, character interactions. Nelson, Labraccio and Rachel form the love interest friction. "Flatliners" is primarily about men and women and how they accept or reject each other.
Nelson is a clearly emasculated character, a brain with hands and a face that is quickly mangled by what he taps from his past. While he pursues Rachel, his motives are never particularly clear. He never says anything of worth to her, other than that she is beautiful - and in the nurse-patient situation, Nelson is maternalizing her sexuality.
Labraccio is the proto-masculine character, rugged and possessed of outdoor gear, a big Army truck and a nurturing demeanor. His attraction to Rachel is more conventional, but he is also apparently uninterested in making the direct advance with which Nelson starts.
Schumacher takes both of these male characters and runs through a process of unraveling the past that seems meant to complete their masculinity.
Nelson must atone for the accidental death he caused at nine, and in doing so (although it is never revealed in "Flatliners) he may resume his emotional development beyond that preadolescent moment. Meanwhile, Labraccio must make amends for his verbal abuse of a little girl before he can express his feelings verbally to Rachel. In both instances, Schumacher and Filardi posit the afterlife as a therapeutic return to the path.
Like her would-be suitors, Rachel is blocked by an experience from her childhood. In her case, her guilt over the death of her father has closed off her ability to feel towards men. Schumacher steers her to a literal re-embrace of her father, and thus the ability to accept and be accepted by all males.
Alone in his male-female plight is Hurley, who is confronted by a constant visual reminder of his transgression against not only his bride-in-waiting Anne (Hope Davis), but it is implied, against all womankind. No fewer than 11 actresses play his chorus of spurned loves. The universe, once it touches Hurley in death, demands he lose his future wife and confront his inner betrayer.
If Schumacher sought to explore the nature of human guilt he certainly hit on it. There is a bit of talk among the characters in "Flatliners" about sin, however, and here the movie falls flat. A more tentatively agnostic (if not atheistic) exploration of sin could not be imagined. Short of a white cross in the hospice wing of the hospital where Rachel works, the move is devoid of denominational icons.
Labraccio repents and makes amends, and afterwards seems to have become some kind of Judeo-Christian, yelling at the ceiling and apologizing to God for playing with life and death. As Platt's character Steckle notes, nothing happens.
Furthermore, the deaths on screen are empty of any spiritual moments, except for a singular moment after Nelson gives his own life for his victims in a reversal-replay of the past. The sky behind the boy lightens, and the boy beckons Nelson. The implications of the event are never explored, as "Flatliners" ends moments later.
This is simple stuff, for what it is. Schumacher makes a film with little subtlety, on any level. Psychology is cut and dried, straight up and delivered in these character vignettes that leave relatively little to the imagination. In some cases his style serves the story, in others it threatens the story. To his credit, Schumacher never wars with his own aesthetics. "Flatliners" starts with a time-lapse sunrise and Sutherland leaping a wall to watch the morning. The screen fills with his face, craggy and golden.
"It's a good day to die," he says.
If one can overlook that kind of clumsy impasto methodology, "Flatliners" succeeds one another level because of Schumacher's heavy hand. Color, light and set are gorgeous to behold. Lifting a page from the previous year's neo-Gothic "Batman" success Schumacher's production and set design team overbuild everything.
Every roof is vaulted, every apartment is flush with wall-length artwork, every alley glows with phosphorescent devils right out of the Koop how-to handbook. Subway stations are flooded with soft blue light, bathrooms boil red, even the streets of Chicago are treated with luminescent greens and yellows. The "real world" of "Flatliners" is a fantastic and lush landscape.
The part of "Flatliners" in which Schumacher's otherwise striking style fails is that of death. The world Schumacher builds in his flatlining character's minds is that of cliche. Wheat fields rush by, mountainscapes scroll across the screen. When Nelson revisits the childhood tree in which his playmate-victim died, it is distractingly stagey. Labraccio's journey into the death of an atheist looks like cut rate "2001: A Space Odyssey" footage. Hurley's sexscape resembles a jewelry commercial.
A conflicted film, then, "Flatliners" is still redeemed by its attention to psychological themes and its mostly gorgeous visual impact. In many ways, it shares the strengths and weaknesses of its genre predecessor, "The Lost Boys," in that it is a striking concept, a deft execution, but several layers shy of a finished structure.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Flatliners, 1990
The part of "Flatliners" in which Schumacher's otherwise striking style fails is that of death. The world Schumacher builds in his flatlining character's minds is that of cliche. Wheat fields rush by, mountainscapes scroll across the screen. When Nelson revisits the childhood tree in which his playmate-victim died, it is distractingly stagey. Labraccio's journey into the death of an atheist looks like cut rate "2001: A Space Odyssey" footage. Hurley's sexscape resembles a jewelry commercial.
