Almost a ground breaking movie, but not quite.

I liked Coma, or at least most of it. Watching Geneviève Bujold's character slowly piece everything together held my attention. It had a creepy atmosphere, which I liked, and the acting was pretty good. But like a few others I feel the ending was a bit of a letdown, and I think I know why.

This is almost a ground breaking film for a female character in modern cinema. (I'm sure someone out there can point to something made in the early 1930's or perhaps some foreign film, but I'm talking American movies made from about 1960 onward.) To get back to my main point, 22 years before Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, 13 years before Jody Foster in Silence of the Lambs and 8 years before Sigourney Weaver was kicking ass in Aliens, we have Geneviève Bujold's Dr. Susan Wheeler.

Dr. Wheeler is a surgeon who is deeply interested in practicing medicine; while her boyfriend; who might be a competent surgeon, we really don't know, is consumed with hospital politics and how they will effect his career. Dr. Wheeler is not a perfect person. Her relationship with Dr. Mark Bellows; played by Michael Douglass, is something of a mess, and it's not clear if it's all her boyfriend's fault. Though he comes across as a bit of a jerk, Dr. Wheeler doesn't look like she wants to put much effort in trying to sustain their relationship any longer. It's also interesting that Michael Douglass' character is right when he tells Dr. Wheeler that she's suppressing her real feelings while she's trying to find out why her best friend became comatose on the operating table, but it's somewhat ironic that it's the killer who helps Dr. Wheeler express her true feelings about her friend.

We watch as Geneviève Bujold's Dr. Wheeler shows her determination to master arcane computer coding to find other mysterious coma's, tangle with the medical mandarins jealously guarding their turf, and follow the clues wherever they take her. She searches through the bowels of the hospital, dodges a hired killer, infiltrates the mysterious and creepy Jefferson institute and makes a daring escape when she is discovered. It's too bad the movie couldn't have ended there, because everything worked really well up to that point.

After her narrow escape Dr. Wheeler is so overwrought she loses her cool and sounds; especially to her boyfriend, like someone who is having a breakdown, rather than someone who has solved a mystery and triumphed over everything that has been put in her way. When Dr. Wheeler suspects her boyfriend is either part of the conspiracy or is being used by the killer(s), instead of going to the police, she hides out and eventually heads straight to the actual murderer thinking he's the one who can help her. In the end she is saved; like every other female character in danger you ever saw, by her boyfriend. Even though he practically needs to be hit over the head to see his girlfriend was telling the truth, Dr. Mark Bellows climbs through the hospital plumbing and metaphorically rides to the rescue.

Now I know Coma was adapted from a Robin Cook novel and the original ending was ambiguous. The reader was left to guess if the heroine survived the surgery. I also know the original relationship between the two Doctors was one of a student and her mentor rather than a romantic one. Either the film makers needed to have the guts to go with the riskier; from a box office standpoint, ambiguous ending or rewrite the ending completely. They had a female protagonist who was very smart and determined, but in a lot of ways she was an ordinary person struggling and surviving through extraordinary circumstances. Because the character was driven by a passion for logical discovery, they needed to make her mistakes logical* and believable, instead it felt to me like the screen writers got lazy and just wanted finish the story, or were under pressure to enlarge Michael Douglass' role. (That last idea is just a guess. It's not informed by any inside knowledge or even rumors.)

Coma is an entertaining film, but I think it missed being something much, much better and something that would have really stood out when it was released.

* The writers needed a compelling reason for Dr. Wheeler not to go to the police. Perhaps she could have been implicated in a crime. (That sounds a little weak to me, but the writers needed something better than what they came up with.) They also needed to establish that Richard Widmark's character was absolutely beyond reproach and perhaps plant some fake evidence that Rip Torn's Dr. George was the real mastermind behind the unexplained comas. I mean something besides Dr. George being a horses ass and giving Dr. Wheeler dirty looks in the elevator.