No "Dances with Doctors": Dr. Costner can't save ailing story

15 Minutes. By Bonnie Booth, AMNews staff. April 15, 2002.

Kevin Costner can do baseball. Movies such as "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham" helped make him a full-fledged movie star. However, since his success in those two films we've also discovered there are a lot of things Kevin Costner can't do. Epic tales of a world transformed, for instance.

The Kennedys. Elvis impersonators.

So, with the release of his latest movie "Dragonfly," it is only natural that the medical profession experience a bit of trepidation as it waits to see if Kevin Costner can do doctors.

In "Dragonfly," Costner plays Dr. Joe Darrow, an emergency department physician whose physician-wife was killed six months earlier in a bus crash in Guatemala.

"Dragonfly" breaks no new ground in its portrayal of the medical community.

The trauma/emergency department in the fictitious Chicago hospital where both Dr. Darrows were on staff resembles the trauma/emergency department of "E.R." or for that matter "St. Elsewhere." Ambulances, lights flashing, come to a screeching halt at its doors, paramedics wheel in a patient, there is frenzied activity, the patient lives to be moved to another floor or dies.

There is a hospital administrator. He is a heartless bureaucrat.

No groundbreaking cinema there.

The Darrows themselves also break little new cinematic ground. The characters are written to the extreme stereotypes of physicians and, for that matter, genders.

Before her death, Dr. Emily Darrow was a pediatric oncologist. Through flashbacks we learn that to know Emily was to love her. She was a beautiful woman whose face exuded caring and kindness. We note that the children's oncology ward where she practiced is decorated with a mural, the centerpiece of which is a photograph of Emily in an Easter costume hugging one of her patients. If your child was diagnosed with cancer, she is the doctor you would want. Extremely compassionate and extremely capable, she was the perfect doctor and the perfect female. [...]