| My Review
One wonders how Threshold ever got made, since the
pitch for it would be difficult to make very exciting,
but I suspect Donald Sutherland had something to do
with it. He plays a renowned heart surgeon collaborating
with Jeff Goldblum’s engineer on a fully self-contained
artificial heart. Goldblum’s character is the sole
spot of freneticism in this movie in which the rest
of the characters act like real people might if they
were unaware that a camera was present. There are
no histrionics, nobody even raises a voice, to the
point where you sometimes have to strain to hear what
is being said. So all of the emotion and tension is
transmitted strictly by the words they speak and the
situations that develop, and this masterful handling
of events and human interactions is strangely powerful
and affecting.
As if to underscore the non-cinematic reality of what
is taking place, there are unexpected turns that no
big-budget producer would have allowed.
Mare Winningham, in one
of her earliest major film roles, is the young girl
who receives the artificial heart with no advanced
warning.
While she is on the operating table (in a
scene that uncomfortably demythologizes any illusions
we might have held about patient dignity during surgery),
Sutherland discovers that her own heart is beyond
repair. He elects to defy the hospital’s medical board
and install the artificial heart. When Winningham
awakens out of anesthesia, we expect the typical celebration
of successful defiance of moribund authority in the
face of radical lifesaving; after all, the new device
worked to perfection.
But this film isn’t about satisfying our Hollywood-accustomed
desires.
Winningham is confused
and terrified by the strange device clicking away
in her chest, beside herself with anxiety because
she’s suddenly unsure if she’s really still human.
Sutherland’s surgeon, expecting at least a little
gratitude, is totally thrown by this surprising reaction.
He’s a mechanic, after all, and he never stopped to
consider the human implications on this one particular
patient.
The film’s ending is unnervingly beautiful, too. We
expect the surgeon to win the Pritzker Prize and be
carried through the streets on the shoulders of his
colleagues, his entire life transformed into a series
of television interviews and lucrative speaking engagements
as the credits roll and triumphant music swells.
Instead, he simply starts just another typical day,
and we leave him as he routinely plans another round
of surgeries and meetings.
There’s no real beginning, middle or end to the events
that transpire in the film. Instead, it’s more like
we happen upon some interesting people at a point
in their lives when something quietly momentous is
occurring, hang around for a while, and then leave
when it’s basically over. That’s why it must have
been a difficult pitch. It’s also why it’s a wonderful
picture.
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