Dragonfly (2002)

There is a moment in Dragonfly when a parrot, apparently possessed by the spirit of a dead physician, knocks over a potted plant and scratches a map symbol into the spilled soil. This is presented without irony, and it is roughly the high-water mark of the film's narrative ambition. Tom Shadyac, a director better known for making Jim Carrey contort himself in front of bathroom mirrors, here attempts the solemn supernatural melodrama, and the result is a film that moves through its grief-stricken paces with the grim determination of a man reading a eulogy he did not write. Kevin Costner plays Joe Darrow, a Chicago doctor whose pregnant wife Emily dies in a Venezuelan landslide, and who then spends ninety minutes being paged from the afterlife by way of comatose children and household appliances.

The cultural inventory here is thin. Emily is a doctor and a humanitarian, which the screenplay treats as admirable and then immediately subordinates to her function as a lost wife and an eventual delivery mechanism for a baby. The Yanomami villagers appear in the final act as noble backdrop, saving souls and handing over an infant with a dragonfly-shaped birthmark, and the film asks nothing of them beyond atmosphere. Joe Morton and Robert Bailey Jr. occupy supporting roles with professional composure, and the film makes no comment on their presence, which in 2002 was simply how a studio thriller was cast. The Amazon functions as a location, not a cause. Nobody in this movie has an opinion about carbon.

What remains is a maudlin exercise in spiritual wish-fulfillment, a film so committed to its own tearful sincerity that it forgets to be suspenseful, coherent, or brief. Critics at the time called it sappy and muddled, and the box office concurred. It lectures no one about anything, which is its sole mercy. A sommelier would describe this vintage as corked, and would then quietly pour it into the sink while the customer was not looking.