“Dragonfly” doesn’t evoke emotions
By Roger Moore
KRT Campus

“Dragonfly” is a weirdly off-putting romantic ghost story that never finds that magical, love-that-transcends-death tone it is aiming for.

© 2002 Universal Studios Kevin Costner plays a grieving doc who tries to contact his late wife courtesy of his patients' near-death experiences in “Dragonfly”.

But it gives Kevin Costner another chance to tear-up, choke up and narrate his grief over a dead spouse in the worst “Message in a Bottle” fashion.

Costner plays Joe Darrow, a Chicago emergency-room physician whose wife dies in the film’s opening scenes. Or does she?

Joe doesn't easily give up the search for Emily, who was lost when her bus is washed away in a Venezuelan mudslide. And after the no-body funeral, the cynical doctor is faced with evidence of supernatural visits. Is Emily (Susanna Thompson) trying to get in touch with him?

His colleagues (Joe Morton, Ron Rifkin) think he’s nuts. His lesbian-lawyer neighbor (Kathy Bates) is sympathetic, but also thinks he’s cracked.

But Emily’s long-silent parrot starts talking as if she’s returned. Children in the cancer ward who go through near-death experiences tell Joe they’ve seen her.

And Joe keeps seeing dragonflies, which Emily used as a “totem” the way some folks decorate their houses with unicorns or angels.

Oscar winner Linda Hunt makes a brief but effective appearance as a curious nun who explains it all to us, and Joe.

The director, Tom Shadyac, has unleashed many a comedy (“Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “Liar Liar”) but has nary a romance on his résumé. So he turns this one into something of a thriller. Granted, the non ghost-believers among us would certainly feel the hairs on the back of our necks rise if confronted with proof of a ghostly visitation.

But Emily is supposed to be Joe’s great love, this benign but insistent spirit. And every time she shows up, she scares the willies out of Joe, and the audience. There's a hint of the menacing tone of “What Lies Beneath” here, but Shadyac would have been better served stealing from “Ghost” than from the Harrison Ford thriller.

We never get a sense of who Emily was. She's just this saintly, curly-haired beauty who marches off, while very pregnant, to the Third World as part of a Doctors Without Borders program.

And after letting his film meander along, shocking us with cheap scares and tiny revelations, Shadyac and the screenwriters jam way too many plot twists into its final act.
Costner has made getting choked up something of a career move of late. Mel Gibson plays crazy well and Russell Crowe has the sullen market cornered.

But nobody chokes up like Costner. He even does it in the Hallmark card voice-over narration.

The whole movie rests on his shoulders, and the character just isn’t deep enough to support it.

“Dragonfly” is “Message in a Bottle” sappy, but the sap feels unearned, here. The great, undying love is declared, but never felt.

In the end, when we should be reaching for our hankies, he has us checking our watches and wondering where the evening went.

credits

TCU Daily Skiff © 2002