Bad Medicine

I've owned the soundtrack album for the movie Medicine Man since the film originally played in theaters 20 years ago. But until this week, I'd never actually seen the movie.

A high school friend of mine had seen the movie, loved the music, and bought the soundtrack himself. Knowing my own love of good film scores, he loaned the CD to me, and I went straight out and bought my own copy. Jerry Goldsmith's score for Medicine Man is a wonderful fusion of classic, sweeping film music, pulsing (though not cliche) tribal rhythms, and interesting synthesized sound effects. It should have earned Goldsmith an Oscar nomination, though the Academy was notoriously stingy to the composer.

Having now seen the movie, though, I think I can understand the oversight. The movie is actually pretty terrible. Goldsmith's score is basically the one good thing about it, and Academy voters no doubt blocked the entire experience of the film from their minds.

The plot involves an aloof researcher (Sean Connery) in the Amazon who has discovered a cure for cancer in the local environment... but is unable to reproduce the exact method he used to synthesize his serum. A bean counter (Lorraine Bracco) who holds the purse strings to his expedition arrives on the scene to evaluate his work, and winds up racing against time to help him before the local rainforest is destroyed by a road building effort. It's all a rather ham-fisted way of expressing the otherwise noble message of nature conservation. The inelegance would be forgivable, but its far from the worst thing about the script.

That dishonor would go to Dr. Rae Crane, the character played by Lorraine Bracco. She's written as an impossibly shrill and abrasive nuisance from cover to cover. The script writer was clearly more interested in the "fish out of water" scenario than any other aspect of the story, and overindulged that interest by writing a character too "fishy" to be believable.

Lorraine Bracco then takes what was on the page and injects even more ridiculousness into the film. She was nominated for a Razzie award for this laughable performance. She should have won. She's as cloying as any of the worst female characters I've seen on film or television in years. It's something of a wonder that Bracco found work again after such a shameful performance.

Sean Connery is only better in that he's really no different than he's been in countless other films. But the script hardly does him favors either, presenting his character as a chauvinistic boor in the opening act. All the better, one assumes the screenwriter assumed, to make the two main characters have to grow more to like each other by the end of film. Instead, it just makes Connery's character as unlikable as Bracco's at the outset; only decades' worth of accumulated screen charisma allows him to (slowly) overcome that.

On the strength of that incredible score, I'd rate Medicine Man a D. But really, why waste your time? Go find the soundtrack somewhere if you're a fan of film music (or Jerry Goldsmith in particular) and save yourself an hour and forty-five minutes.