Viking Night: Flatliners
By Bruce Hall
June 28, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Most of the time, I find the hardest part of my day over before I leave the house.
The same motivation is probably behind a lot of science. I don’t mean cold showers; I mean people who seek knowledge for the sake of perspective. The more you know, the more you realize there is to know, which can be a mind-blowing experience. I would imagine the medical profession attracts many such people, and then mostly weeds them out by the age of 30. The rest, I can only assume, are left to dance on the fringe of the profession like a sexy mashup of Doctor House and Doctor Who.
Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland) is such a man, a medical student obsessed with exploring life after death, but still young enough to somehow be nihilistic about it. He has concocted a regime of experiments whereby he intends to explore the boundary between life and death by pumping himself full of drugs. Off screen, he’s managed to recruit a team of (somewhat) like-minded classmates who all have their own reasons for wanting to work with him.
Rachel (Julia Roberts) is mousy in the way Hollywood thinks mousey girls look, and she brings the earnestness and idealism of a child into the Afterlife Sweepstakes. Dave (Kevin Bacon) is a petulant, evangelical atheist - which is a character you have to have in a movie like this. Randy (Oliver Platt) is a preening intellectual who carries around a voice recorder and prattles on in overblown beat-prose like his own hype man.
Finally, Joe (William Baldwin) is an arrogant lothario, and therefore the one most likely to achieve actual success in the medical profession.
Dave and Rachel seem to have a muted personal interest in one another, but aside from that the group seems only casually familiar overall. At the beginning of the film, it’s clear that Nelson has already approached them. It’s also clear that they’re all terrified at the implications, but are obviously going to go through with it because most of them were on the movie poster, so how could they not? It’s an admittedly thin setup, telling us little about each character aside from what you’ve learned from me so far.
There’s also a battle for Sexiest Lips of all Time between Roberts and Baldwin. I couldn’t pick a winner, so I just kept watching.
I’m not sure what to make of the school where the kids study. It’s a campus of imposing Gothic (obviously) architecture, the interiors of which look like a ‘90s era Madonna video. The curriculum appears to consist entirely of pulling things out of cadavers while stern looking women pace a hole in the floor behind you. Were this not a Joel Schumacher film I would find this strange, but it is, so I don’t. Nonetheless, I can see why so many of the students there are obsessed with death. There can’t BE that much else to think about in an environment like that.
After classes, Sutherland has a plan whereby using a combination of drugs, refrigeration, and Kevin Bacon’s dreamy gaze, he will medically snuff himself, and then return from the Great Beyond. It sounds very impressively dangerous the way it’s described in the film, but it seems to go pretty well the first time. Even after an especially aggressive CPR session, he seems positively refreshed. When he reports the wondrous feelings he experienced while under, the others are inspired to try it out themselves.
This might be where Flatliners first flirts with the borders of logic in much the way all Schumacher films do. The same people who were so dead-set against this earlier now begin challenging one another to “beat” Nelson’s time. The awe with which these people recently viewed death falls away rather quickly. I suppose you could make a number of narrative arguments for this, but to me it feels like a stylistic choice. These characters have been drawn with very broad strokes, and their personality traits are necessary only to define them relative to the film’s premise.
If you can accept this, you’re good to go. If not, Flatliners might go down like a bad burrito.
Personally, I can take it. It’s obvious early on that the movie wants to explore some interesting themes. What if we could play with the boundary between Here and There with relative impunity, just for the sake of the experience? Would we learn enough to change ourselves for the better, or would it make the experience less meaningful? Worse yet, could it become as weirdly addictive as taking cold showers, and might there be a terrible, horrible price to pay?
Apparently, the answer is mostly yes, and the way Flatliners presents all of this is, for a time, engrossing. This does not mean the movie is a home run; as I implied there is a terrible, horrible price to pay. For all the moves it makes toward asking Important Significant Questions, Flatliners kind of chickens out before it’s all over. It actually functions as a pretty good horror film for much of its run time, and I’m afraid it gets caught up enough in this for the story to ultimately unravel before landing. If you like to watch brooding twentysomethings with fabulous hair and great looking clothes ruminate over the meaning of life as a story evaporates around them, then you’ll be thrilled.
If you’re looking for more, you will be disappointed, but you will still be entertained. There is truly some brilliant camera work in this film, and a dreamy, ethereal atmosphere permeates the entire film. Also, if there's a shortage of steamy, rain slicked, artfully lit thoroughfares where you live, it's because Joel Schumacher took them for Flatliners. This is a goddamn great looking film, to the point where it begins to carry weight when Nelson begins to fear he's tapped into something dark that he can't control.
Something dark and very BLUE that he can't control. Still, I can’t help but be a little annoyed by the way things come up short in the story department. The kids protest about science and discovery, but they're not very scientific about ANYTHING. They approach their experiment like a fraternity dare and each time they push the limit, they become more competitive with one another. And just when you worry that they’re losing sight of the reason for what they’re doing, you realize that no - the MOVIE is. Joe comes across like Quagmire from Family Guy. You want to punch Randy in the face.
Rachel gravitates between being something for the men to fight over and being an actual plot catalyst. Everything LOOKS great, and initially SOUNDS great, but ultimately feels as weightless as the strips of fabric and plastic sheeting that are hanging from in the background in SO many scenes during this film.
Flatliners is basically a movie about some kids who develop a death fetish, and it comes back to haunt them. Replace these characters with the ones from The Lost Boys, and you have a far more controversial film. As it is, Flatliners is stylish, sexy fun that makes you think, but only a little. Schumacher is known for making distinctive films that are often equal parts social experiment and high melodrama. Sometimes that's a good thing (Falling Down), and sometimes it's not (St. Elmo’s Fire simply sucks).
Flatliners is exactly those things, but in a good way. It straddled the line between summer blockbuster and high concept horror think-piece as deftly as Nelson and his friends straddle the line between our world and the next. It’s a philosophically vapid but genuinely entertaining story about letting go, moving on and growing up.
Plus lots of Gothic architecture, acres of steam, and Kevin Bacon’s splendid mullet.
That's a win in my book.