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Threshold [VHS]

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With the recent news (July, 2001) of the implantation of a portable powered artificial heart in a patient in Louisville, Kentucky, real life finally catches up with the story told in Threshold. This quiet and prescient film from 1981 imagines the personal and ethical questions that are faced by a medical team who develop an artificial heart, and then are faced with the question of implanting it in their first patient, a young woman whose own heart is rapidly failing.
Donald Sutherland gives an understated and completely believable performance as the heart surgeon who leads the team. Jeff Goldblum plays the scientist-inventor of the heart, and his struggle for both recognition and an ethical understanding of what he has helped unleash is contrasted well against Sutherland's self-assuredness. Mare Winningham is the patient; she is almost whisper-quiet in her performance, pulling the audience in to be sure they hear her murmers. The scenes are remarkably accurate in detail, making the film seem almost like a documentary at times. The narrative remains strong, though, up to what is perhaps an overly-optimistic ending.
Emmy-award winning Richard Pearce directed Threshold, one of his first feature films. Recent work has included the video remake of South Pacific.

"Threshold" is a little recognized movie gem. The directing, photography, acting and screenplay are crisp and realistic. There are few, if any, bells and whistles here. Donald Sutherland's portrayal of a physician is the best I've ever seen on film. His every movement, every word, even his posture says "surgeon". If you love film and can do without action, sex, violence and vulgarity for two hours treat yourself to one great performance: Threshold.

An amazing film that is inexplicably unavailable in NTSC. I might have to order the PAL and convert it myself, although that is a serious pain. American distributors, wake up!!

When discussing movies, oftentimes the topic comes up about the greatest unknown films. Such a list film buffs guard, a fluid, evolving set changing over time. The 1981 Canadian film "Threshold" has been a constant on my personal "Greatest Films No One Has Ever Heard Of" list for three decades. A beautifully subtle medical drama, it stars the great Donald Sutherland as Dr. Thomas Vrain, a successful California heart surgeon with an emotional investment in his patients. He calmly goes about his day, performing surgery while listening to classical and jazz music. He arrives late for his children's school recital and sits in the passenger seat while his wife drives the family home.

During the work day, he performs heart transplants none too successfully and stumbles upon an eccentric genius Dr. Aldo Gehring (Jeff Goldblum) at a medical convention. Gehring's a fast talker, but he's also gifted, having created an unusually efficient mechanical heart. Dr. Vrain sees a unique opportunity to ease the suffering of his patients and convinces gruff hospital investor Edgar Fine (John Marley, approaching the end of a splendid career) to finance the research.

"Threshold" was several years ahead of its time, as today mechanical hearts are common place. The film gets so much right about the atmosphere of a successful healthcare institution. Top medical personnel slog through board meetings with executives and discuss ethics and finances daily. A few of the elder doctors and administrators are resistant to change. Dr. Vrain seeks the mechanical heart not for personal or historic gain, but to save lives. It's a political minefield he maneuvers with unusual decency.

We are introduced to Vrain's patients, including Henry (Michael Lerner), a lovable Italian man with a joke for every moment, and Carol (Mare Winningham), a timid 20-something angel of a woman. Both have failing hearts and Dr. Vrain earnestly tries to find a solution. Henry receives a heart transplant, and signs of recovery are initially good until his body rejects the organ. In the midst of surgery, Carol's heart stops working. While she lays on the surgical table minutes from death, Dr. Vrain quietly turns to Gehring and says, "Well, go get the thing." And thus, the first mechanical heart surgery is performed. What follows is never predictable, and a series of unforgettable scenes are so well acted as to be stunning. Most notably is the brilliant performance of Winningham as Carol, who questions her own humanity with a machine inside her body pumping blood. If this film had been a success at the American box office, she would have certainly been nominated for an Oscar.

The screenplay was written by James Salter, a highly-regarded American novelist best known for such books as A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel and Solo Faces: A Novel. He briefly dabbled in screenplay writing, churning out the interesting Downhill Racer: The Criterion Collection and this film, before returning to more rewarding pursuits. Several revelations and a character's evolution are undoubtedly due to his talented pen. There was a time when this film's director Richard Pearce was one of the most promising talents in Hollywood. He had debuted with the breathtaking pioneer drama Heartland in 1979, followed by this film and Country in 1982. There was a fascinating subtlety to his quiet works of art, his natural style in many ways so authentic as to resemble a documentary. Such realism was a gift, but it sadly did not bode well for an art form evolving into one based upon box office receipts.

This film is also a rare opportunity to see Sutherland in one of his most sympathetic roles. In a career marked by a large number of quirky and villainous characters, it was always refreshing to see him in a heroic light. His work in Ordinary People and this film show his incredible depth as an actor and just how appealing he could be if given the right role. "Threshold" is not only one of the greatest medical dramas in history, but one of the great films of the decade of the 1980s. It is a rewarding and inspirational work.

THRESHOLD (1981) is one hell of a Canadian film, and I feel it's high time I reviewed it. It's an all-time favorite that I hadn't seen in two decades, but I got a blessing and just saw it again on cable. As rare as a brontosaurus sighting in Africa!

Starring Donald Sutherland as cardiac surgeon Thomas Vrain and Jeff Goldblum (as Aldo Gehring, a sort of unhinged Robert Jarvis), this movie is decades ahead of its time, as we knew when we first saw it in 1982.

First the lousy news: this thing is NOT on dvd and I could never find a damned VHS of it back in the 1980s. Always a moratorium - and now the heartbreak of no dvd. This thing was a big deal, so far back in time I can't recall where I saw it. It was so fresh and new I have never forgotten it, and that's the main thing.

At some California hospital, Dr. Vrain is the best cardiologist on earth, but he's having a tough time with mortality rates. Heart transplants are a vicious business, and rejection is at a percentage I dare not even guess. Even today - and how many people today are walking around with Jarvik hearts?

Enter Dr. Gehring, a Ph.D. in medical biology. He's been working on an artificial heart for 12 years, and wants Dr. Vrain to hear what he has to say. The heart itself, once designed, is beautiful - Dr. Robert Jarvik's genuine article. I've always heard this movie is based on real events. Perhaps.

Its acting is not strained or corny: a HUGE leap for 1981. Pity it took everyone until the late 1990s to catch on to the tv potential of this kind of work. The hospital setting, the characters and the medicine/surgery are 100% spot-on brilliance. Sutherland was too young to be a scene-chewer, and Goldblum is so youthful he's inadvertently hilarious. Freshly minted star-to-be.

Mare Winningham as the nearly comatose (I mean her acting) Carol Severance (get it, severed from her old heart?) plays the first recipient of the artificial heart. So long ago that this was big news in 1981, hence the brilliant and moving story.

Despite its Canadian origins (filmed entirely in Toronto and funded by the Canadian government), I am NOT going to let go of the tantrum I have every time I realize this is not in my dvd collection. It's high time the industry pulled its head out of its proverbial, and got these excellent films on dvd. Call it a "cinema stimulus package" if you like. Hell, even the producers started a trend here: film in Canada, it's cheaper, it looks just like America and the acting is superlative.

Not to toot some weird sort of horn, but I cannot say enough about this film and the story it tells. Is an artificial heart - an organ that a few generations ago was not even to be touched - a thief of humanity? Are we really playing God because we made "a heart better than any God made" (as Dr. Vrain tells his patient)? The implication that a human may feel turned into a golem is heavy in this film.

But look at the trend THRESHOLD started. You can say it ended with SOMETHING THE LORD MADE (2004), an HBO Film starring Alan Rickman and Mos Def, about the blue baby surgery and the birth of open-heart surgery itself. Meanwhile tv took off with a pathetic idea ("St. Elsewhere") and look where we are now: the patently stupid and insulting "House, M.D.".

Based on all this, I know THRESHOLD would stimulate tens of thousands of viewers if they could get to see it!

This film is what the new release, "The Hollow Man," hoped to be. Threshold convincingly and deeply explores the meaning of life, death and the invisible in-between. The biggest questions aren't whether you can be seen, they come from what you can't see--what's inside. Are you any less a person with an artifical heart?