MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Gross Anatomy’ Needs Some Script Surgery

The young medical students in “Gross Anatomy” (citywide)--five hopeful surgeons sharing the same dissection table during a punishing first med-school year--aren’t the kind you’d want pawing around your pancreas in some emergency.

Self-centered, callous, shallow, they don’t express much desire to help people beyond the formula rote idealism you’d expect from students-on-the-make. Except for pregnant young Kim (Alice Carter), they seem low on sensitivity, as well. These are kids, and a movie, with tunnel vision: yuppie-doctors-in-embryo. One of them (Todd Field) pops pills and hides biochemistry textbooks naear his cadaver. Another (John Scott Clough) is a silk-shirted apple-polisher. They’re privileged kids for whom success is a touchstone. The major seeming exception, fisherman’s son Joe Slovak (Matthew Modine), is slotted as the group’s sexy rebel. He bounces a basketball on the way to his class locker.

This sounds like good meat for a satire of the medical profession--a movie that might cheerfully savage its mercenary tendencies--and “MASH” and “The Paper Chase” are the obvious inspirations, along with the real-life experiences of co-producer and ex-med student Howard Rosenman.

But “Gross Anatomy” isn’t really geared for satire or humorous realism. There’s a charismatic mentor here, like “Paper Chase’s” Prof. Kingsfield, plus some of “MASH’s” jock irreverence and a pale carbon of its hip, funny attitude toward gore. Mostly, though, the five writers who’ve pawed over this story in three shifts have shot it full of ‘80s raw pragmatism and sentimental tomfoolery and left it anesthetized on the table, full of cheerless twitches and spasmodic eruptions of programmed mirth.

There’s another deodorant-ad notion of a love affair: Novak and Laurie (Daphne Zuniga) do much of their wooing on a jogging track and, when Laurie succumbs, she says simply “You got me!” Novak’s rebellion, meanwhile, is limited to helping his roommate cheat on exams and cheerfully telling his examiners that he’s in it for the money. (So, apparently, is the movie.)

Christine Lahti is cast in the John Houseman-type role and, though she is a brilliant actress, she is used badly here. The script suggests that Lahti’s Dr. Woodruff sees Joe as a kindred spirit: a rebel, an outsider, a born doctor. Instead, she seems another movie fairy godmother, inexplicably hung up on a self-absorbed goof-off. When, in the movie’s big passing-the-torch scene, Joe finds her wasting away from lupus and begins screaming “What do you want from me?,” you want to set him right back to his fisherman dad, perhaps to be used as bait.

Is this any way for a potential surgeon to act toward an obviously dying woman? You’d like to think the writers are being sarcastic with Dr. Woodruff’s response--she gives him a be-all-that-you-can-be speech--but no such luck. Fifty years ago, Joe would have been wafted with a heavenly choir out of this benediction from his female Dr. Chips straight to worldwide surgical fame. Here, we know we’re heading toward the ‘80s equivalent: a climactic sexy clinch with Daphne Zuniga and soft-rock under the credits.

The director of “Gross Anatomy” (MPAA-rated PG-13 for sex and language), Thom Eberhardt (“Night of the Comet”), shows occasional verve and a lively touch with the actors--especially Modine and Field, surprisingly good as Joe’s amphetamine-crazed roommate. But there’s a no-exit shallowness to this ‘80s sentimentalism where people scream, rage and insult each other, cheat, strive ruthlessly for success, and go warm and gooey after they pass the final exam. Who needs heavenly choirs? “Gross,” in this case, describes the anatomy class and the movie itself.

‘GROSS ANATOMY’

A Touchstone Pictures presentation in association with Silver Screen Partners IV. Producers Howard Rosenman, Debra Hill. Director Thom Eberhardt. Screenplay Ron Nyswaner, Mark Spragg. Music David Newman. Camera Steve Yaconelli. Production design William F. Matthews. Editors Bud Smith, Scott Smith. Art director P. Michael Johnston. With Matthew Modine, Christine Lahti, Daphne Zuniga, Todd Field, John Scott Clough, Alice Carter, Zakes Mokae.

Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children younger than 13).