White Noise for the Last of the Boomers

Author's Rating:

Pros: intriguing story, good performances, interesting food for thought

Cons: silly, punts rather than runs to the end zone

The Bottom Line: 
Don't go to punch your ticket. Go to have fun.

Author's Review
There's a whole genre of film - most of them horrors and thrillers - devoted to the line between this world and the next. As in the Garden of Eden, we humans are always reaching for some low-hanging fruit, regardless of whether we've been cleared for take-off. The result is more than our share of fig-leaf moments when God Almighty shows up (without calling), catches us in a slip of the tongue and tells us to get our clothes on and get the hell off his property.

What can I say? It's in the genes.

Flatliners (1990) is one of several films that explores the line by giving us more Adam-and-Eve wannabes who don't leave well enough alone, can't help but ask Pandora, "What's in the box?" and who end up regretting the hubris that ever told them to "buy now, pay later."

Kiefer Sutherland plays Nelson, a medical student at a Washington-area medical school, who recruits several classmates to help him to stage a bold, new experiment: intentional flatlining so that a scientist such as himself may experience death and return to talk about it.

Nelson's colleagues and "partners in crime" include best friend, David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon) who remains an atheist and resident skeptic. Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts) has her own reasons for going along - and is included because of her skills as an anaesthesiologist. Joe Hurley (William Baldwin) has agreed to document it all on video footage, while Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt) refuses to participate, but is willing to go along if doing so lets him to acquire enough information to write up a story (or documentary) about the whole matter.

As individuals, each has their own reason for taking what are essentially unreasonable risks with their own careers. Talented or not, this team knows that if it gets caught (killing each other to bring one another back from the grave - at longer and longer intervals) they will all be expelled from school - and likely barred from any career as medical personnel.

So, why do they do it?

Your guess is as good as mine, though suggestions do abound. Nelson is an arrogant but charismatic seducer. He's John Nash, looking for that great idea, if you can imagine Nash as Gordon Gekko in a labcoat. Mannus has lost someone. Labraccio may not be the hardcore atheist he claims to be (like the woman who announces she's engaged just to keep a few creeps at bay). Either that or he IS a hardcore atheist but is just sick and tired of hearing Nelson prattle on - and wants to play The Amazing Randy to Dr. Raymond Moody's Life After Life - which has made a cliche out of near-death encounters. Joe is in it for the action. Randy Steckle is a flirtatious virgin, loudly adamant that he wants nothing to do with this, but always on time for the show.

Whatever you can say about them, as individuals, the doctors-to-be in Flatliners are perfect reflections of the transition between eighties, status-hungry yuppies and nineties outlaws, for whom "experiencing the real" meant getting a lot of mileage out of the letter "x" - in the form of "extreme" activities, "ecstasy" and "expirational" fantasies. This bunch is too dressed-up for the nineties, but too "eccentric" for the eighties. They're also the perfect characters to set up a supernatural horror flick, the kind who monkey with the moral order just long enough to dare the gods to give them a comeuppance that's simply "out of this world."

Nelson, who takes the first walk on the wild side, experiences an immediate rush that sends the others (except for Steckle) into a bidding war. The coin of the realm is time, itself. Whoever dares to flatline the longest is the one who gets to go next. What they don't realize (in part because Nelson doesn't tell them) is that even white lights come with strings attached. According to this film's interior logic, if you die before your time - with sins on your head - you risk a Hellish confrontation. What's more, if you come back to this world, with such a monkey on your back, you're going to end up confronting a physical manifestation of your own worse nightmares.

In short, when life invades death, death invades life. That's the only way to restore the moral order - at least for a group caught opening their presents before Christmas Day. And for this group of arrogant, competitive, narcissists-in-residency, death doesn't take a holiday: It moves into the neighborhood - loud stereos and all. Death, it turns out, is not a good neighbor. Soon, everybody's life is a walking terror. Nelson is getting beaten by a demonic little boy. Mannis is seeing "dead people." Joe Hurley is haunted by the many women he has betrayed. Labraccio keeps seeing a girl he made fun of as a boy. Steckle is the exception, but that's because he never had the guts to test the boundaries. He is contented to watch others live, die and come back to life while he stands around mumbling into a pocket recorder.

As an exploration into how different people handle a common experience - even one as artificial as designing death-as-recreation - Flatliners might have made for an interesting drama. This film, however, has other plans. Given its relatively lavish production values, it might be mistaken for a supernatural thriller - but the setup is pure Hollywood horror. It's way over-budget for cult horror, but its storyline (the betrayed moral order as a can of whoopass) is typical of the genre.

Joel Schumacher's direction adds to the genre confusion, mostly because we're expecting more from this film than cult horror. Schumacher evokes good performances out of his cast - hypnotic charisma from Sutherland, wry wit from Platt, a cool everyman quality from Bacon, smirking immaturity from Baldwin and pure pathos from Roberts. Jan de Bont's cinematography is a visual feast. The same goes for the production design and the art direction (provided by Eugenio Zanetti and Jim Dultz respectively).

There are two enduring image systems built into this film that score consistently, even while the film fails on other levels. The first is the afterlife sequence, where Jan de Bont's cinematography combines rich, saturated colors that work well with Schumacher's fluid camera work. The second is the use of Greco-Roman iconography, from the statues that watch (protectively) over these unwitting fools to the artwork that reinforces its themes of Proteus and his ill-fated theft of fire.

If anything, the intensity and beauty of these images is sometimes a little too good. It's so slick, it draws attention to itself. One is continually reminded that this is a big-budget Hollywood production. Amidst stage lighting, filtered light, requisite puffs of steam to put some business into the background, and a host of other items that cost more buck for the bang, it's easy to wake up from the dream.

The biggest failing is in the script, itself, written by Peter Filardi, whose credits include an episode of MacGuyver, The Craft, Ricky 6 and Salem's Lot. To his credit (pardon the pun), Filardi is working within his wheelhouse, which is basically cult-themed stories cleaned up for a mainstream (sometimes tweener) audience. It's lightweight horror, with a few screeching cries and rappings underneath the floorboards, but without the substance to really tell the story.

Flatliners works best as an intriguing concept with decent performances and a few set pieces thrown in for good measure. Its biggest failing is that, for all the expense, it doesn't know how to take the ball into the endzone. Every time opportunity knocks, it gets a door slammed in its face. It starts out with worthy material to explore, and then settles for plot points that might as well come out of a TV show on the WB.

This film is replete with examples of style over substance. One, in particular, involves the setting for the Franken-labs of Nelson and Company. Having already argued that a group of medical students could steal expensive hospital equipment, without attracting the slightest degree of suspicion, Nelson and Company could have taken the equipment home and used that equipment in complete privacy. Instead, they end up squatting in a large, abandoned crack house, adorned - as it would seem - with abudnant images from classical Greece.

It's not a bad location, visually, but logically, it's more of a wash. After all, who (in their right mind) would jeopardize a medical career to perform illegal medical experiments - in semi-privacy, and with stolen equipment. And, if this is, in fact, a crack house, where are all the crack users? How do you run electricity through a house that has no occupants - and therefore no one on record to be responsible for the cost of electricity? The only reason to use this place is its convenience as eye candy. Beyond that, it's an amazingly stupid location for a film of this kind.

In fact, if I were going to die, I'd want to do it at Nelson's house, which turns out to be one elegantic pad. I'll always wonder where a medical student gets the income to afford such a huge house. If the production values were any richer, we'd be watching a romantic comedy. Instead, we're watching a dark thriller/supernatural horror, but we're watching it in some fairly vibrant colors.

Filardi must be used to writing so much genre work that Flatliners gets the typical walk around the block. But in writing for television, Filardi assumes (as does the Goth audience in general) that the audience will buy a television story, dolled up enough in dark colors to make it run the bases as a horror film. It's really a soap opera disguised as a cult classic.

What results is mostly silly stuff. A decade before The Sixth Sense, Flatliners shows the power of the Stephen King approach, where the ordinary and the supernatural are carefully overlaid. Unfortunately, the Sixth Sense balances its set pieces with serious human drama. We care about its characters. I'm not so sure about the ones in Flatliners, all of whom seem to be conceited, status-driven, yuppies.

The Flatliners dvd is somewhat disappointing. It contains the film - in both wide and full-screen versions. What it doesn't contain is a director's commentary.