When
a close long-term relationship ends in the death of one partner,
the survivor will understandably grieve even after the memorial
service, which is supposed to bring closure in ordinary circumstances.
In Dragonfly, Dr. Joe Darrow (played by Kevin
Costner) is an emergency room physician at Chicago Memorial
Hospital whose wife Dr. Emily Darrow (played by Susanna Thompson)
reportedly dies in severe weather in the Andean jungle of
Venezuela on a mission of mercy. As the film's tagline asks,
"When someone you love dies . . . are they gone forever?"
Although Joe tries to bury his grief in overwork, his professional
judgment is increasingly affected, especially when he begins
to receive clues from emergency room patients that Emily is
trying to communicate with him from the dead. One of the clues,
however, is not immediately decoded: Two young patients, who
know Joe's name though they never met him before, repeatedly
draw a strange symbol after they come out of a coma. When
Joe screws up at the hospital one day and is encouraged to
go on a two-month sabbatical to avoid medical sanctions, he
decides to join some of his hospital buddies in a white-water
raft trip. Looking at the map one night, he sees the same
symbol that the two patients have been drawing; for an explanation,
he telephones a buddy, who says that the symbol stands for
a waterfall. Accordingly, Joe believes that his wife is beckoning
him to the area of the waterfall where she reportedly died.
He then flies to the remote jungle and ultimately enters a
village of the indigenous Yanomani, where he learns why Emily
has been trying to tell him something, and her dragonfly birthmark
provides confirmation to the quest. Directed by Tom Shadyac,
Dragonfly excels as a video postcard of the
Venezuelan Andes and as an anthropological exploration. MH
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