Dragonfly
Low Bandwidth
Anyone who has been around the Internet for any length of time knows about low bandwidth. Low bandwidth means that it’s harder and takes longer to get information through the pipeline. Back in the infancy of the Internet, low bandwidth was basically all that was available; it could take hours to download a measly one-megabyte file on a 2400 baud modem. But you can still experience low bandwidth today - for example, try checking your e-mail on a dial-up connection while downloading three MP3 files at once while hanging out in two or three chatrooms. Takes a while. Low bandwidth hampers conversation, impairs access to information, and is generally annoying and bad.
In Tom Shadyac’s Dragonfly, Dr. Emily Darrow (Susanna Thompson) experiences the ultimate in low bandwidth; she’s dead. Emily dies in a senseless bus crash on a Red Cross rescue mission to South America. However, her spirit is still hanging around there in the netherworld, and her spirit urgently needs to contact her husband, Dr. Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) with some key information. Unfortunately, the connection from the Other Side is even worse than AOL. Dragonfly is essentially the story of Emily’s attempts to send a simple, short message to Joe - a two-paragraph e-mail, basically - and Joe’s attempt to interpret the message.
In life, Emily was a pediatric oncologist, so she uses the lives of child cancer patients to communicate with Joe. (One can’t help but wonder what would have happened if she had been a lawyer, poor Joe would have to figure out acrostics in the Northwestern Law Review or something.) She’s able to send messages through the children as they undergo near-death experiences. The children come back with some scattered symbolic images - a rainbow, a wiggly, squiggly cross - and a vague command to take a journey.
This sort of thing would be enough to drive anyone buggy - literally, considering that Emily is a fan of dragonflies that seem to show up everywhere. Joe manages to hold together pretty well at first, but his stoic grief turns into full-blown hysteria quickly enough, culminating in a desperate trip to South America to discover the source of the strange and unnerving messages.
All of this sounds pretty awful, and there is a good deal of awfulness in Dragonfly. Nonetheless, the movie doesn’t sink to tragic, horrible depths of awfulness, although it has every opportunity to do so. That it doesn’t sink that far is entirely due to one aspect you almost never find in this kind of movie - restraint. Restraint is the saving grace of Dragonfly, the one thing that keeps it from flying erratically out of control, and ultimately, the only thing that makes it anything close to interesting.
A small example here. At one point, Joe goes to dinner with his family, and his sister brings along a friend. The friend just happens to be a cute redhead. She just so happens also to be a “grief counselor”. This predictably gets Joe all hot and bothered once he finds he’s been set up. The two have a fiery little exchange, and Joe yells at her, says he doesn’t need any help dealing with his loss.
What’s interesting about that? Only one thing, we never see the cute redhead again. Ever. In any other movie, well, c’mon, you know what would happen; they’d see each other again, they’d find love, they’d kiss. None of that happens here. Instead, the whole thing is just dropped, in, well, kind of a restrained way.
(While we’re on the subject, take note of the two female leads in Dragonfly. In a Hollywood culture that’s obsessed with impossibly high standards of beauty, it is almost a radical act to cast a movie co-starring women characters that don’t meet those standards - even if those women are Oscar winners. Kathy Bates and Linda Hunt are indispensable to whatever success Dragonfly enjoys.)
Costner himself contributes to the restrained feel of the movie. Until the script causes him to just collapse into a morass of awfulness towards the end, he remains dignified and stoic and honest. Costner has a face that’s all cut out for grieving, but he doesn’t let his character’s grief infect his performance. It’s not a classic Costner performance by any means, but it is so infinitely better than his wretched performance in 3000 Miles to Graceland that it’s almost comforting.
The supernatural visitations are treated with the same sort of uncharacteristic restraint. As gloppy and sticky as the whole thing is at times, it’s not hard to imagine how the material could have been made absolutely unbearable. There are some moments where Dragonfly tries to be a scary chiller of a movie, but these moments are handled fairly effectively, with a minimum of frightfulness.
Of course, the restraint in Dragonfly only goes so far. The movie is saddled with an ending that is at once horrible and predictable. Worse, it’s recycled from other awful movies; there are references to the dippy tearjerker Simon Birch and the horrid-beyond-words Dr. T and the Women.
Still, restraint and self-discipline are such rare qualities in the movies nowadays that it’s hard not to applaud them when you see them. There are a lot of things wrong with Dragonfly, but at least it delivers its awfulness on a low bandwidth.