In
Romancing the Stone (1984), Michael Douglas
plays the part of someone seeking a valuable gem while making
love to a beautiful woman in a tropical setting. In Don’t
Say a Word, Dr. Nathan Conrad (played by Michael Douglas)
searches for a gem in New York City as the ransom to save
the life of his daughter Jessie (played by Skye McCole Bartusiak),
who has been kidnapped by Patrick Coster (played by Sean Bean),
who has just been released from prison. The tale begins in
November 1991, when a Brooklyn bank vault is robbed of a gem
by a team of high-tech criminals. Through a double-cross,
one of the team places the gem in her eight-year-old daughter’s
doll, but dies when Coster pursues him to his death on the
tracks of a New York subway. The daughter, Elisabeth, then
goes to Hart Island in the East River, where her father is
to be buried; she places the doll in his grave, marked only
by a sequence number. For the next ten years, she feigns mental
illness, going from one institution to another, until she
(now played by Brittany Murphy) is brought to a facility where
Dr. Conrad once worked. A former colleague assigns the case
to Dr. Conrad, who delays his return home to his wife, bedridden
with a broken leg, to handle the case. On the following morning,
Thanksgiving, Dr. Conrad awakens to learn that his daughter
has been kidnapped. A telephone call from Coster informs him
that he has until 5 p.m. to find "a number" from
Elisabeth, and tells him "Don’t say a word"
to the authorities. Dr. Conrad must then solve a puzzle, as
the kidnapper gives no clues about the robbery, Hart Island,
or what the number represents. As Dr. Conrad follows his pursuit,
the tension rises, but ultimately he finds out about the robbery
from Elisabeth, so he takes her past security, hijacks a motorboat,
and lands on Hart Island in order to jog her memory. The kidnapper
arrives on the island to find the doll, whereupon he intends
to kill everyone, so there is a fight between Dr. Conrad and
Coster, but filmviewers are never in doubt about the outcome
of Don’t Say a Word. Directed by Gary Fleder;
the screenplay is based on the novel of the same title by
Andrew Klavan. However, there is one unanswered puzzle. Why
Elisabeth was shunted from one mental institution to another
all that time while fooling everyone as to her sanity? The
answer that filmviewers will ponder as they leave the cinema
is that psychiatry has become less a matter of conversation
in recent years than of pills, which sometimes create rather
than solve a realistic mental problem. MH
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