Colin Moore
“It’s a good day to die.”
Not the words you’d expect from a doctor in training but Nelson (Keifer Sutherland) later explains, “I don’t want to die. I want to come back with the answers to death…and life.“ His fellow med students think he’s half wacky. Videotape lothario Joe (William Baldwin) and quippish Steckle (Oliver Platt) jump on board without much arm-twisting but talented classmates Dave (Kevin Bacon) and Rachel (Julia Roberts) decline in the name of sanity. In the end though, curiosity wins. They all show up on that first night at his bedside gurney, in the vacated museum that somehow doubles as a gross anatomy lab, with all the gizmos needed to stop Nelson’s heart and then start it again. Physician assisted physician suicide. Stranger still there’s a happy ending here.
But it was cool back in the day. There they are, the words that imply it’s not my taste at fault but the fact that certain somebodys were born too late to really truly “get it.” A quarter century ago, “Flatliners” (August, 1990) opened like a pop song. It was catchy and its video polished. Former fashion designer turned screenwriter turned film director Joel Schumacher’s star was on the rise in 1990. His previous films took blows from critics (“St. Elmo’s Fire,” “The Lost Boys”) but audiences approved of his atmospherics and young ensemble casts enough to keep his stories profitable. The actors chosen for “Flatliners” were an easy draw for 18 to 35 year olds, three likable performers with recent successes: Bacon earlier that year in “Tremors,” Sutherland with “Young Guns” and Roberts surpassing them both with her star-making “Pretty Woman” just months before. She would become the highest paid actress of the 90s. Platt meanwhile was a relative unknown and Baldwin a year away from his full-dorsal shower scene in “Backdraft.”
“He can do almost anything,” Schumacher says of Sutherland in a Lost Boys retrospective (see YouTube), “because he’s a born character actor and he was at 18. And you can see it in “Lost Boys” because he has the least amount of dialogue of anyone in the movie but his presence is extraordinary.”
Sutherland’s Nelson is given the lead of sorts. Of all the flatliners, he is the one with the vision, with the driving obsession of breaking new medical ground, Hippocratic Oath be damned. After his cold nap, he’s brought back to life with a heating blanket and a pair of those chest zapper things, groggy and blanched, with a vague notion of having experienced something in death. What he doesn’t say is that a dark part of his past has tagged along. Billy Mahoney, a boy he had a hand in killing in a childhood bullying incident, has bridged the gap to the living, at least in his mind. “Somehow we’ve brought our sins back physically. And they’re pissed.“ Pissed enough to use Nelson’s face as a hockey puck anyway, in one of many color saturated scenes Schumacherized for mood enhancement. It only follows then with a cast that the director still recalls with a gush of pleasure, that the others get their dead cake and eat it too (so bad it’s almost funny, like “St. Elmo’s Fire”). But instead of simply recreating the experiment, they go further, outbidding each other in 10s of seconds for the privilege of going under next, Joe for fame, Rachel to resolve a personal tragedy and Dave to ask God which version of “Footloose” he likes best (so lame it’s almost funny, like “St. Elmo’s Fire”).
“As a writer, I’m trying to promote some alternatives to nihilism. Art, I think, has a larger purpose than just diversion. Art is a transcendent view of the mundane.” The words are from Bruce Joel Rubin, the writer of “Ghost,” “My Life” and “Jacob’s Ladder,” films also produced during the era of “Flatliners,” films that also “shift the arena a little bit from the world of action into the world of spirit.” Schumacher’s though is as summer-popcorn-morality-tale as it gets: simple, slick and energetically acted with its lesson fully spelled out. Spoken out actually, by Nelson, for those August movie audiences dizzy from beer and sunstroke. “Help him find Billy Mahoney,” Dave tells his friends. And why? Nelson knows. “Because, young doctor Dave thinks he’s solved our karmic problems. Atonement gentlemen.”
Sometimes obvious is fine however, happy endings too so long as they’re fought for and earned by the characters telling the story. Not all of this bunch qualify. We’d like to think Joe hangs up his whoring ways after being haunted by his one-night-stands (and dumped by his fianceé) but wouldn’t be shocked at a lapse, but when Dave delivers an “I’m sorry” to a girl he used to bully, now grown, it feels sincere. Billy Mahoney though is dead and Nelson sees re-flatlining as the only way to make his apologies. Rather unfair, this man-of-science thing, how Michael Corleone can confess away decades of mob sins while Nelson has to kill himself. Luckily for him, “Flatliners” debuted in mid-summer, the movie season of optimism. When Nelson’s spirit is granted forgiveness and runs to back life under a Disney-like tweak in James Newton Howard’s score, it feels like a different movie. Is there a feeling today that this is disingenuous? To start dark and end sentimental? Change on occasion is good, even from the past. Personally, I’ve had enough Paranormal Activities to last a lifetime.
