A cuore aperto

I wasn't really looking forward to seeing this film, and only ended up watching it because it stars Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum, two of Hollywood's most talented and inimitable actors.

In the end, though, I glad I did watch it - THRESHOLD turned out to be an engaging and absorbing drama. It's a fictional account of the first ever artificial heart transplant, and feels so realistic that you'd never guess it was made two years before the artificial heart became a reality.

Donald Sutherland's first-rate performance is probably the highlight of the movie - when he's this good, you wonder if there's anyone he couldn't act off the screen. A then unknown Jeff Goldblum holds his own admirably as the idealistic young doctor who invented the artificial heart, and the film features some impressive camerawork, most notably the opening tracking shot.

All in all, it helps if you're a Sutherland fan, but it's not essential; this is one of those movies whose relaxed pace, absorbing atmosphere and strong performances will have you hooked right from the start.

"Threshold" is a film with a very clear, heavy presence of reality. The trade-off of this, of course, is the same as all such realist films - pacing. This is not something you can watch for big thrills and the explosive energy of medical trauma. Richard Pearce, and his cinematographer, Michel Brault, create a world that looks and feels so human it's almost painful. Each successive scene is like a new revelation on light and colour and depth of field. Brault gets right into the action, the movement, the emotional expression. The most remarkable thing about James Salter's script is how it avoids all those common medical clichés and falsehoods so often employed in such stories. The three lead actors - Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldblum, and Mare Winningham - are observed in an almost documentarian way. They are people of depth, but not in a way we commonly see in films. The characters in "Threshold" are not distant, no, but what we get from them depends on our power of perception. They are laid out in front of us in much the same way as each person we encounter in life. That's the great strength of Pearce's direction here (his next film, "Country", has a similar approach).

"Threshold" is mostly unknown, and not available on DVD. There is one main reason for this - it was a Canadian production, released at a time when such films weren't widely seen, and commonly forgotten soon after. I paid a significant amount to purchase the VHS online. I don't regret this, but the breathtaking cinematography deserves a modern format.

For some reason, this very good movie only has a paltry overall score of 5.9 at this time. It's especially odd since all the reviewers (so far) score the film higher...often quite a bit higher.

"Threshold" is a great name for this movie. After all, it's about someone receiving the first artificial heart and only a year later, a primitive sort of artificial heart was implanted in a human. Because of this, I am not sure the term 'sci-fi' is appropriate. Instead, it's a film about what was about to become...though even to this day, such devices are only experimental.

Dr. Vrain (Donald Sutherland) is one of the foremost heart surgeons in the world. He's an expert at transplants, though he's interested in possibly implanting an artificial heart in the future. So, when he meets a weird biologist (Jeff Goldblum) it appears such an operation might be completed.

This film is not that farfetched and making such procedures seem possible is its great strength. Additionally, while I certainly am no surgeon, the surgeries you see look pretty realistic. However, some might balk at the path the film takes, as very soon after the surgery occurs, the story ends....and my wife hated this. She wanted to know more...though because this is unchartered territory I didn't mind the vague ending.

Overall, some excellent acting and an absorbing story make this worth seeing.

This movie is well-worth watching and I highly recommend it for many of the reasons from others listed here. As another reviewer "tdilts9219" noted, it appears based on the famous Texas heart center in real life. Surprisingly in 1998, the fictional 1981 plot came even closer to a real life situation. In Oxford England, Aug 1998, a renowned heart surgeon Stephen Westaby placed heart replacement pump AB-180 into a young woman Julie Mills to save her life. The AB-180 was invented by George Magovern, a US inventor and has the same key property as the heart replacement in the movie. Add a few of innovations from Jeff Goldblum's fictional inventor, and AB-180 would be a match for the movie. Wait another decade, and it might be another case of sci-fi preceding reality. (source Reader's Digest, April 2000)

I wish this film would come out on DVD. Others here have written well about the movie, so I won't add to that. But it's illuminating that 25 years after I first saw it, there are scenes that still stand out vividly in my mind. One of my favorites is when, the night before the surgery while Sutherland is making his final plans, he pauses for a moment in front of the x-ray light box, and spreads his hand out on it. He quietly examines his hand, the hand of a surgeon that will soon cut out a woman's heart and replace it with a machine. Can he really do it? Should he? An amazing moment. Whoever has the rights, please release this on DVD!