r. Joe Darrow (Costner) races to Venezuela, where his wife, Emily (Thompson of Star Trek: Voyager), has been working for the Red Cross. But Joe is too late. A bus accident has apparently killed all the passengers, including Emily. The bodies were not located, but Joe is informed that no one could have survived. A funeral for Emily is held in Chicago.
Joe returns to his work at the emergency room, pulling around-the-clock shifts, avoiding his grief. Soon, Joe raises the concern and then the ire of his supervisor (Morton).
At home, Joe faces ever-present reminders of his wife, then strange and disturbing occurrences. Emily's personal totem was the dragonfly—and her dragonfly paperweight mysteriously rolls across Joe's floor. Joe confides in his colleague Dickinson (Rifkin of TV's Alias) that he has been seeing dragonflies everywhere. Perhaps Joe just needs to get away? He contemplates a trip with his college buddies.
But feeling the need to fulfill a promise to Emily, Joe looks in on her remaining patients. Emily specialized in caring for children with cancer. They include Jeffrey, who tells Joe that during a near-death experience, he saw Emily calling out for her husband. Joe has his doubts.
But when a second boy, Ben, also claims to have seen Emily while in a coma, the widower is shaken. Unlike Jeffrey, Ben never knew Emily. Joe is determined to find out what is happening.
Joe seeks counsel from his pragmatic neighbor, Miriam (Bates), and from Sister Madeline (Hunt), a Catholic nun dedicated to investigating near-death experiences of children, and begins to wonder whether he has lost the ability to distinguish imagination from reality.
This ghost story
drags when it should fly
In Dragonfly, from director Shadyac (Liar, Liar, Patch Adams), a talented cast wrestles with a story that is neither moving nor thrilling nor suspenseful. In his first stab at serious drama, Shadyac makes use of symbols, including a dragonfly and a wavy cross, but they function merely as predictable plot devices, lacking earned meaning.
Dragonfly refuses to allow the audience to draw even the simplest of conclusions. This attitude manifests itself in Joe's voice-over narration and the constant and overbearing repetition of information. At the opening of the film, Emily's dragonfly paperweight is joined by a dragonfly mobile she had ordered. Next, a flashback shows Emily's dragonfly birthmark, and then, in the next scene, Joe tells Dickinson that the dragonfly was Emily's totem—that she even had a birthmark and he always had to search for dragonfly items for her. Talk about beating a dead dragonfly.
The story is rife with odd plot contrivances. Miriam, the next-door neighbor, happens to be a stereotypically butch lesbian, her sexual orientation an obvious and unnecessary tool of the writers to guard against any possible romantic tension between Joe and Miriam. Other plot contrivances include a talking bird and a Venezuelan guide who has no license, until, when it is convenient for the plot, he demands Joe return with him or he'll "lose his license."
The dialogue is flat. Characters speak their feelings plainly and openly, leaving no room for the actors to add subtext or shades of meaning. In one scene, a grief counselor tells Joe, "You need to grieve." The Venezuelan guide (Vargas) has such cleverly rendered and culturally informed lines as "No! Estop, señor!"
Beyond the stereotypical and racist portrayals of the Venezuelans at the close of the film (including a shameful attempt at recreating the Yanomami tribe), Dragonfly's cardinal sin is that it is utterly predictable.
