Near Death Experience

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good production values, especially acting, ...

Cons: ... although story is innovative, it is simplistic and unreal.

The Bottom Line: 
A nice little movie - but not a great one - about a man who comes back from the brink of death a changed person.

Author's Review
When we first meet Henry Turner (Harrison Ford), he's a hard charging mean-minded Wall Street type lawyer, a partner in a big firm, rich and married to Sarah (Annette Benning) with a bright young daughter. Then he stops in a mini-mart at an inauspicious moment and a robber shoots him in the head. The wound is almost fatal, but surgery saves him ... sort of. Henry's mind is wiped clean. At first he a sort of vegetable but his dedicated physical therapist, Bradley (Bill Nunn), gradually teaches him to walk again, and talk again (only this time he sounds like an imitation of Bradley). When he's strong enough, he's sent back to his wife and child ... even though he cannot remember them and is timid around them. Elizabeth Wilson is his devoted secretary, Rebecca Miller is a fellow lawyer, and John MacKay and Donald Moffat are his law partners. The director is Mike Nichols.

He has become a sort of a changling. It's Henry's body but the personality is completely different. Previous to being shot, Henry was appallingly ego-centric and inconsiderate, but out of rehab he has turned into Francis of Assisi. He's welcomed back at his law firm, everyone introduces themselves to him anew since his memory is still a blank, but when he studies his pending cases he realizes that he's been concealing crucial evidence in order to win. This starts to gnaw at him. Then he stumbles upon a secret that he didn't tumble to before the shooting, and another secret that he had been keeping, and his entire perspective is changed.

When this movie came out in 1991 it inspired a lot of dumb jokes about the therapeutic value of shooting lawyers in the head. It also inspired a storyline in the TV series, L.A. Law. In a way, this is the reverse of Stephen King's Pet Semetary -- in that one people returned from the dead as very malevolent and here Henry returns as a much nicer guy. This movie, coming at it did at the beginning of the 1990s, straddles the Me Decade with the period of sensitive men.

This is a good movie but not great. It plays the story as deadly serious, as if it could happen in reality, but it becomes more and more obvious as it progresses that it is unrealistic. One obvious bit of unrealism is that Henry bounces back to become more or less completely functional within a matter of months (his pending court cases are still pending), and even though his partners know he doesn't remember their names they are willing to gamble that he remembers everything he learned in law school, and the ending is a bit too sugary and singularly impractical (much like the ending to Nicolas Cage's The Family Man). If you can tolerate the unreality, this is a good movie.