Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Review
by Harvey S. Karten (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)October 25th, 2001
FINAL
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Cowboy Pictures/ Lions Gate Films
Director: Campbell Scott
Writer: Bruce McIntosh
Cast: Denis Leary, Hope Davis
Screened at: DuArt, NYC, 10/25/01
Maybe the studios are taking another look at the success of Milos Forman's 1975 gem, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." In that seminal adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel, a feisty misfit enters an insane asylum and inspires his fellow inmates to assert themselves against the repressive caretakers. Moral: the psychiatrists are crazier than the patients. Maybe the politically conservative cartoonist Al Capp had it wrong when he ridiculed the concept of the loonies taking over the lunatic asylums. Along comes "K-PAX" twenty-six years later, featuring a guy who's locked up in a Manhattan psychiatric institute for saying he's from another planet. Like Jack Nicholson in the earlier movie, he shapes up his fellow patients much faster and more effectively than the doctors. That Kevin Spacey's character is institutionalized for his delusions is absurd. I'd like a buck for every New Yorker who thinks he's from another world and is roaming the streets, even holding a responsible job. (We New Yorkers, by the way, ARE from another planet and proud of it.) But "K-PAX" get the ol' Hollywood treatment, treacly, cornball, and with a copout ending.
But now, by contrast, along comes actor Campbell's Scott directorial debut with a film that costs all of $100,000 and compared to "K-PAX" is superior fare up and down the line. This is a thinking person's sci-fi psychi-romantic tale about a mental patient who thinks he was cryogenically frozen in 1999 after he had a serious auto accident, has been thawed out four hundred years later presumably after a cure is found for his wounds, and is being held irrationally in a Hartford, Connecticut asylum against his will because nobody believes him. He recognizes his emotional instability to some extent, though, because he hallucinates and sees the world outside his barred window as a series of holograms. Nevertheless he has the darndest paranoid fantasy that the good doctors are going to give him a lethal injection to finish him off, a last meal and a final sendoff--wherein we get the title of the film scripted by Bruce McIntosh.
Though "Final" has a dandy twist toward its conclusion, its main attraction is its stellar performance by Denis Leary as patient Bill Scott and Hope Davis as Dr. Anne Johnson. They play off each other like fire and water, with Anne's calming influence serving as a foil for Bill's energetic ranting and pacing. While we in the audience admire how the doctor regularly cools her patient off, her soft voice usually keeping the hospital security goons at bay, the real delight is watching Bill light a match under the pretty young woman's butt in a splendid illustration of patient-psychiatrist transference. In the tradition of the genre as set up by "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the patient and doctor switch roles from time to time but this time it's the romantic buttons that are pushed, enabling the repressed Dr. Anne Johnson to become emotionally involved with the frisky ward of the state of Connecticut.
Director Campbell Scott makes an otherwise photographed play cinematic by introducing a series of flashbacks, as Bill recalls the love of his life as she was in 1999 and daydreams about his drunken operation of a speeding truck. He recalls as well his father's advice to marry a particular woman who would make him happy for the rest of his life and the way he
speeds to the hospital while his dad, weighing 95 pounds, is in his final throes. From time to time Bill acts like a dude on acid as he imagines the sedately attired doctor dressed like a college cheerleader (good choice: Hope Davis looks a lot better that way).
Denis Leary, known to his fans as an in-your-face stand-up comic and for edgy roles in pictures like "Wag the Dog" and "True Crime," plays the vulnerable card this time. He's witty, he's frisky, but he never gets over his suspicion that his fight against the authorities is a lost cause. Hope Davis is splendid as the doctor who gives a nuanced performance, credibly showing her metamorphosis from detached professionalism to the helplessness she feels in her growing affection for the patient.
Do studios get what they pay for? Sometimes. In this case, though, rather than get wowed by the special effects borne of the countless millions that Universal spent for "K-PAX," we get a down-to-earth, solid character-driven film exploring the way two people can affect each other in life-affirming ways--all at a cost of only one hundred large.
Not Rated. Running time: 111 minutes. (C) 2001 by
Harvey Karten, [email protected]
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