Brain Death

By -- John Skow

COMA

Directed and Written by Michael Crichton

Just after the big autopsy scene, with that great shot of the salami-slicing machine sectioning the brain of Genevieve Bujold's best friend, who died as a result of going into a mysterious coma during a routine abortion, but just before the neat bit where Bujold gets chased through the big refrigerator where the frozen corpses hang by their heads, there is a really fantastic murder by electrocution, and they don't just dim the lights to let you know the juice is on, or anything corny. You get a head-on view of the dying guy, with some pretty good jerks and twitches, and really weird blue sparks coming out of his eyeballs.

Well, as they say, if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will like. Michael Crichton, who directed Coma and wrote the screenplay, is a doctor, and so is Robin Cook, who wrote the novel from which the film was made, so presumably the two of them are not try ing to induce a nationwide spasm of hysterical loathing of the medical profession.

Nevertheless, the single source of dramatic energy in this crude thriller is Crichton's exploitation of the audience's rational and irrational fear of doctors and hospitals -- the always reliable "Let me out of here!" reaction as the anesthesiologist's gas mask clamps down over the face, and the familiar "Yuck" effect as the surgeon's bloody hands dip into the body cavity. This is arrogant moviemaking: its assumption is that the proles will buy their tickets and march unprotestingly through the fun house no matter how evident is the contemptuousness of the barkers.

As Cook's story has it, highly placed bad guys in "Boston Memorial Hospital" are selling human organs illegally, and they are willing to do anything to ensure a fresh supply. The flower-like Bujold, who does not look tired enough to have finished medical school, plays Dr. Susan Wheeler, a brilliant surgical resident who stumbles prettily from creepy suspicion to grisly certainty. But no one in the hospital, including the kindly chief of staff (Richard Widmark), will take her seriously. Her lover, a crass young intern (Michael Douglas) who looks as if he will make a great golfer some day, keeps saying "I know, I know" and offering her Valium. He won't take his turn at cooking dinner either. Is he one of the nasties in the giblet-peddling ring? When the villains strap Bujold to the operating table for an appendectomy she needs like a hole in the abdomen, will she survive to put makeup on her scar? Finding out the answers is like having an inoculation: you get a little sick, but after that the odds are that you will have nothing at all to do with hospitals.

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