Medicine Man Reviews

Politically correct to a fault, MEDICINE MAN pleads for the preservation of the rain forest; were it a more compelling film, its message would doubtless do more good. Dr. Robert Campbell (Sean Connery) is a bad-tempered loner whose biochemical research deep in the South American jungle is financed by a major US pharmaceutical company. Embittered by the death of his wife years earlier, Campbell drowns his sorrows in work and local liquor. Having lived among them for so long, he's accepted by the native tribal people as a kind of benevolent witch doctor--a medicine man. Exasperated by his refusal to file reports, his employers send Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) to his remote camp to find out what he's doing. Even though his funding is at stake, Campbell is less than hospitable. He refuses to tell Crane what he's doing and treats her with barely concealed contempt. This state of affairs gradually improves as she comes around to his view of Amerindians as an enlightened culture living in harmony with the rain forest. Crane is also astonished when she learns the nature of Campbell's research: quite by accident he's discovered a cure for cancer. The problem is that he's lost the formula, and is desperately racing to reproduce it before a multinational logging company destroys the jungle. A fire destroys Campbell's lab, but he stays to rebuild, and Crane stays with him. MEDICINE MAN's heart is in the right place, but its body is so uninteresting that few viewers ever discover it. It's two films in one, but this isn't a bonus: neither is compelling. The romantic comedy in the rain forest suffers from casting that, had it worked, would have been called bizarrely inspired. Since it doesn't, it's simply bizarre. The middle-aged Connery's much vaunted charm is little in evidence here; he's lumpen, disagreeable and not even particularly attractive. As Dr. Crane, Bracco is abrasive to an almost unbelievable degree; her name may be meant to foreshadow the empathy with nature she eventually achieves, but it leads one to think of the more appropriate birds after which she could have been named--starling, jay or crow, for example. Crane is meant to be a no-nonsense careerist, a company woman and a scientist with a clear sense of purpose. But she's a shrew, shrill and obstinate; one keeps hoping she'll drown in a lake or be eaten by a jaguar. As a couple, Connery and Bracco generate no romantic sparks, and the screenplay doesn't help. It's possible that screenwriters Tom Schulman and Sally Robinson intended to subvert convention cleverly by not having Crane and Campbell sleep with one another, but since it's clear that we're meant to believe they've fallen deeply in love by the film's end it would be nice to sense that sex is a possibility. The second film is an impassioned eco-adventure, one of several films with green themes announced by the movie industry recently, and one of the biggest actually to make it to the screen. Though dwarfed in scale by Hector Babenco's monumental AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, it seemed to have the greater commercial potential, and MEDICINE MAN did in fact open big, followed by a quick fadeout. The film's sentiments are laudable, and it contains a few truly moving scenes of awesome trees falling before the bulldozers and devoured by flames. But the cliched story overshadows the film's political concerns, making them seem equally trite and awkward. Director John McTiernan, responsible for such action hits as PREDATOR and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, seems to have no feel for less blunt material, and his presentation of the jungle dwellers is particularly unsubtle. They're the same old noble savages, gentle, childlike and in touch with nature, ripe for ruination by "civilized" men and women, a stereotype as pervasive as it is simplistic. MEDICINE MAN tries hard to be a film for all tastes, but it ends up appealing to none. (Adult Situations, profanity.)