The pervading spirit is not a ghost of William Congreve or of John Dryden, but apparently someone closer to Lloyd C. Douglas or A.J. Cronin, those raconteurs of medico-religiose uplift: Magnificent Obsession, Green Light, The Citadel. The story is set, true enough, in England in the early days of the reign of Charles II, although the accompanying musical selections are mostly a bit ahead of the times, relying heavily on Purcell, who would have been four years old when the action opens and six when it closes. And the personal odyssey of a debauchee/doctor, proceeding first into total debauchery and then into dedicated doctoring (pioneering such advanced techniques of clinical psychology as musicotherapy and sleeping with one's patient), eventually comes around to a humorless pun on the movie's title. Too late, by then, to give any shape or impetus to the meandering, trickling narrative. Robert Downey, Jr., copes all right with the English accent (having had some practice in Chaplin) but not with the spiritual ascent, and Meg Ryan puts up only the feeblest excuse for an Irish accent. On the brighter side, there is an image of a literally open-hearted man -- a walking, talking bloke with a hole in his chest -- that seems a pity to waste on anything other than a horror film. Much the same could be said for the bird's-head leather mask designed as protection against the plague. And Hugh Grant, in a smallish part, has a funny moment of something approximating horror when he looks, with the eye of a professional artist, at the amateur daubings of the protagonist. Throughout, the period production is up to its (or its viewers') eyeballs in riches, which director Michael Hoffman allows to be mushed together and devalued in a shallow casserole of browns, burnt umbers, ambers, old golds, burgundies, clarets. With Polly Walker, Sam Neill, David Thewlis, Ian McKellen. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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