Abbott’s constant search for evidence of human nobility, and his struggle to do both good and well within his wholly contemporary life, are in the end invested with as much import as the most transparently Herculean of endeavors. That is to say, he too spends most of his hours and days reaching for things out of reach. It is to this film’s great credit that we never want him doing anything else.
Directed by Guillame Abruzzo. Starring: Channing Tatum, Tabu, and Rufus Sewell. With Max Perlich.
The first line of dialogue in Guillame Abruzzo’s ponderous but ultimately compelling science fiction film Mine is a single mumbled four-letter word for excrement. An unnamed astronaut (Max Perlich), attempting an arduous docking maneuver, has just botched the job, resulting in the implosion of the vehicle with which he’s trying to dock, and the deaths of the several astronauts we’ve just seen sitting inside.
That Abruzzo’s war-is-hell-in-space film opens with such a scene is not remarkable in and of itself. That it occurs eighteen minutes into Mine is astonishing. For a full eighteen minutes, without music or dialogue, we watch Perlich prepare for the docking. He checks his calculations, works on the computers, fidgets with a valve, all in silence. He’s got no HAL or GERTY to talk to. His capsule is a dump, papered over with drawings and notes, random detritus floating past while he works.
In lesser hands, this would be about as exciting as watching a computer programmer at work. But Abruzzo guides our vision toward the astronaut’s bloodshot eyes, his uneven stubble, the recurring itch in his left ear. We don’t see what he’s typing, but he hits the delete key more than seems normal. When the docking fails and the vehicle implodes, Abruzzo presents the abrupt shift from drudgery to tragedy as a fact of life, nothing else.
We see in Perlich’s world-weary (space-weary?) eyes such a loss of hope that we know what’s coming next before he does. Again, Abruzzo refuses to telegraph, sticking with a medium shot. The only thing in motion is the astronaut’s arm, first crossing himself, then reaching for a lever that sucks everything out of the cabin, including him, leaving us to look at the cored-out hull of a ship, now merely space junk. Reading this, one might be tempted to interpret this as an act of hari-kari, a self-sacrifice in the face of dishonor. But after waiting eighteen minutes for it, the meaning is unmistakable: Perlich’s astronaut can’t bear to be alone for another moment.
By this point, half of the audience has likely filed out of the theater. This is not the movie they’ve been sold in the trailers. That movie does show up, eventually, with music, and dialogue, and scenes set on an Earth much like ours. There are no funky costumes, no futuristic cars. No alien invasion. Only advanced space-travel technology.
We are, as usual, at war with each other. The players are divided into three factions: a EuroAmerican Coalition, a PanAsian Group, and an Anonymous-like collective of privateers and hackers (called Kernel) operating out of a base near Birdling’s Flat in New Zealand.
Space archaeologists (the identities of which are never made clear) have discovered a highly protected and booby-trapped burial-chamber-cum-mine on the Martian surface. After an attempt at a joint mission, the botched docking incident has prompted the EuroAmericans and PanAsians to declare war on each other in pursuit of whatever lies beneath the Martian surface. The Kernel team functions as a sort of terrorist third-party.
Abruzzo isn’t one for battlefields or lasers shooting across the vastness of space. He prefers cameras mounted inside space helmets, fogging up with each breath. There are no buildings on Abruzzo’s Mars—meaning nobody takes their helmets off outside the spaceships. Everyone is isolated within their own spacesuit and bubble-mask. Why, one might ask, hire Channing Tatum as your leading man if he’s going to spend most of your movie behind a full-face version of mirrored sunglasses? (The answer probably lies in shooting schedules—Abruzzo is a notoriously slow director, and Tatum’s character is played by a body double for much of the film.)
Once on Mars, the factions recognize that they must rely on each other to survive. The petty differences that separated them on Earth are momentarily put aside as they face the fact that the ancient civilization has done everything in its power to protect the loot from outsiders. Abruzzo seems neglectfully disdainful of this part of the film. There’s speculation that the factions’ sudden spirit of cooperation stemmed from a studio note, and that Abruzzo’s killing off Tatum shockingly early was his response. In any case, Tatum’s death sets off a series of fatal skirmishes, including hand-to-hand combat, in space suits, on the Martian surface. For a spell, Abruzzo loses himself in a Spielbergian playground of references, dropping nods to everything from Three Kings to Charlton Heston’s little-known prospectors-and-propellers film Mother Lode.
In the end, two astronauts are left: the PanAsian group’s Tabassum (played by the Indian actress Tabu) and Kernel’s Haxxor (played by Rufus Sewell). Deep in the complex, at the final door blocking the way to the mine’s inner chamber, Haxxor sabotages Tabassum’s oxygen and she’s forced to return to her ship. Haxxor, welding tools in hand, manages to penetrate the final chamber: the heart of the mine. Suddenly, a crackling sound dominates the soundtrack—Haxxor’s Geiger counter—and he vomits inside his helmet, collapsing to the ground. The prize, it turns out, is an ancient nuclear waste storage container, the “booby traps” intended as a warning system, a benevolent KEEP OUT sign left behind by an ancient civilization.
Tabassum doesn’t make it to her ship. Abruzzo gives us a long shot of Tabassum’s suit, supine in the Martian dust, then cuts to a camera inside her helmet. Her eyes flutter. The final image is her view of the vastness of space; it flickers to black every time she blinks. This goes on for three and a half minutes. As the blinks grow longer, we notice—I’m not sure if some digital effects nudge us or if we naturally end up focusing on it—the tiny blue Earth among the stars and planets.
Mine is a narrative of pettiness, avarice, and bellicosity resulting in nothing. As such, it puts on grand display the worst of human nature. But within his plot, Abruzzo refuses to let go of the essential humanity of his characters; their nobler selves must contend with the roles they are fated to play. These forms have been around since the Ancient Greeks, but in Abruzzo’s vision, there’s a crucial difference: the gods have absconded. Civilization tends toward self-destruction, Abruzzo seems to be saying, and while the individuals comprising that civilization have no chance of escape, they do have the right to their own little pieces of subjectivity, if only for the time being.
Directed by David Cronenberg. Starring: Sandra Vergara, Abigail Breslin, Zendaya, Isis King, Robert Patrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Patti Hansen, Tommy Lee Jones, Sonia Manzano, Bryan Cranston, and Johnny Depp as Dr. Dipak Desai.
Dr. Disgrace begins with a patient (Robert Patrick) heading home after—joy of all joys—a routine colonoscopy in a crowded clinic. “What about this?” he asks, tapping the bandage on his forearm. “Just take it off when you get home,” he’s told. He rides in a cab down streets lined with beige medical buildings and little stucco offices with signs in English and Spanish—lawyers, payday loans, bail bondsmen—before turning into a neighborhood of tidy ranch-style houses in grassless yards. Jagged red mountains ring the desert skyline; only as he unlocks the battered security door of his house do we see the iconic lights of the Las Vegas Strip in the distance. When the man pulls the tape from his arm, a red gout of blood saturates the rug at his feet and he finds an IV needle, left behind in his vein at the clinic.
So begins the film: glittering riches in the distance, the gorier realities of life firmly in the foreground.
If you’re squeamish, stop here. If not, meet Dr. Dipak Desai (Johnny Depp). Depp’s Desai is based on a once real-life physician, owner of several successful endoscopy clinics, and generous donor to the local Hindu temple of the same name. But when real-life Desai, who lived with his wife in a $3.4-million home in the Vegas Valley, began cutting corners to save money, his scrimping would ev
entually expose forty thousand—yes, forty thousand—patients to HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C through tainted injections, unclean instruments, and the kind of carelessness that leaves needles behind in patients’ bodies.
In director David Cronenberg’s version of these now-public events, the whole disgraceful affair is parsed by a class of college students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who devote a semester to sifting through the events at the clinic and the ensuing media attention under the guidance of their ethics professor (Sonia Manzano, in a role that will gladden the hearts of every forty-something who remembers her as Maria from Sesame Street). The cast includes Sandra Vergara, Abigail Breslin, Zendaya, and Isis King as an assortment of pretty young co-eds with lives that seem so easy, until we see that one has addiction issues, one is a teenage single mom, one is transgender, and one has, well, let’s just say a bad boyfriend and a questionable side job. Tommy Lee Jones, an abrasive libertarian rancher who “doesn’t believe the hype,” joins the crew alongside Daniel Dae Kim, the quietly traumatized veteran who believes in conspiracies of silence. The group also includes Patti Hansen as a woman returning to finish her bachelors degree after her kids leave for college (mirroring her own return to the screen after a hiatus of nearly three decades), and an odd performance by Jaden Smith as a physics prodigy who appears bored during discussions about ethics. Together, the class absorbs the grisly details of the case, condemning Desai by degree without totally dismissing his humanity. (Which is not to say that Desai isn’t an evil man; fans of Cronenberg who come to Dr. Disgrace expecting a film along the lines of Dead Ringers or The Brood may find this film disappointing… until the scenes of Desai gowning up and conducting procedures in his clinic.)
Some of what Cronenberg has Desai do is beyond ludicrous and yet terribly mundane, like making his staff cut disposable hygienic bed pads in half to save twenty cents, or skimping on basic cleaning supplies. Others are disturbingly meticulous, like hiring certified nurse anesthetists rather than anesthesiologists, a distinction that lets him (over)bill insurance companies and avoid the scrutiny of his medical peers. But these are nothing compared to his actions in the procedure room (more on that in a moment) and his inexcusable decision to reuse bottles of anesthesia intended for single use with a single patient. Desai deliberately violates the drug maker’s guidelines and routinely puts his patients at risk—and when the bottles get low, he consolidates the contents, spreading the risk as far as possible. (In real life, eight patients with acute Hep C are known to have gotten it in Desai’s clinic, and one of them has since died; so far, over a hundred more have been identified, including those infected indirectly.)
As the students come to realize, the bigger picture is complicated by the question of drug company liability, the failure of Desai’s bullied staff to blow the whistle, and the degree to which the HMO he worked for is responsible for the injuries he caused. This last is a central question. His services were cheap, but were they too cheap? He did more colonoscopies more quickly and for less money, and there’s no doubt that the HMO rewarded his “efficiency,” but did they know he was a rotten doctor and decide to look the other way? This is the type of suspicion that haunts the students, whose growing distrust of medical authority leads them into increasingly bizarre forms of paranoia. One refuses to immunize her baby; another stops taking anti-seizure medication, preferring to risk brain damage than trust the student health center staff. One who works nights at a hotel on the Strip gets fired and then arrested for overreacting (and how) to a random drug test, while another suffers insomnia to the point of violent sexual hallucinations with all-too-real consequences. These ruptures happen in addition to their other challenges; some are first-generation college students, non-native speakers of English, all are strapped for cash, and the economic crisis looms constantly in the background like the glittering skyline of the casinos behind the law school library where they meet each week.
Even so, it’s really Depp’s movie, though he never speaks. Depp captures Desai’s heavy face, the empty bloodshot eyes, and the creepily aggressive silence; he radiates deep malevolence even as his defense attorney tries to convince a judge that he isn’t fit to stand trial because of a series of jailhouse strokes (brought on, no doubt, by the strain of being held accountable). One doesn’t want to be unkind to a man who isn’t well—especially not during an exploration of ethics and the failure of professional empathy—but it’s hard to see Desai as a fellow human being. Robert Eglet, legal counsel for the patients who sue the HMO (Bryan Cranston, in a pinstriped suit and heavy glasses), is the embodiment of contained moral outrage in the courtroom scenes. His summation—taken from transcripts—uses monkey see, monkey do, and monkey say to illustrate the secrecy, failure to act, and pressure to remain silent at the clinic (his graphics would be in terrible taste if the whole affair wasn’t already so over the top).
Eglet is as sensational as he needs to be, describing Desai as the “fastest endoscopist in the west,” what others in the field call a “jammer”—Desai was so fast, in fact, that he’d been known to splatter feces on the walls and ceilings when yanking his scope out of the viscera of his unconscious patients. (Knowing this, his refusal to give his staff enough disinfectant to properly clean the scopes of blood, tissue, and waste between procedures is all the more indecent.)
The students form their own conclusions, according to their political and religious beliefs; one prays for Desai, another wants to see him get the death penalty, and a third contemplates killing him with a high-powered rifle. By the end of the film, a jury finds the HMO liable for $24 million in damages, pharmaceutical companies are sued to the tune of $500 million, and Desai is charged with second-degree murder and other crimes.
But there’s little satisfaction in any of this, especially when the attorneys gather their files and step aside, and we see, sitting in court, the patients who got sick. Almost all of the students in the group finish the semester knowing that convention alone is the fragile basis of public trust, and that our safety and peace of mind have always depended on the non-malevolence of strangers. In other words, don’t expect a happy ending.
Directed by Martin Brest. Screenplay: Eleven writers credited. Starring: Hugh Grant, Jennifer Aniston, Zooey Deschanel, Michael Cera, Julia Roberts, Queen Latifah, and Stanley Tucci.
Once every decade or so, a film comes along that’s so familiar, palliative, and obvious that merely focusing on it becomes an exercise in reining in the cultural associations it inspires in your subconscious. Days later—hours in some cases—it becomes difficult for viewers to remember anything about the film, and at best they are left with distinct emotional sensations akin to a prolonged experience of déjà vu.
The plot of A Bird in the Hand is easy enough to delineate, if you write it down while you’re watching it: Doyle Southampton (Hugh Grant), a rakish British lawyer living in New York City, is about to settle down with his smart but high-maintenance girlfriend Jessica Bird (Jennifer Aniston), when Jessica’s fun-loving, hipster younger sister Cambridge Bird (Zooey Deschanel), whose age difference is explained by Jessica calling her “the family accident,” shows up from college and sweeps Doyle off his feet.
Reading this, you may ask how, if they’ve been dating for three years and living together, Doyle has never met his girlfriend’s sister before, but this question doesn’t occur to you while you’re watching the film, because by the time Cambridge is introduced, your skills of perception and discernment are so thoroughly benumbed, someone could replace your popcorn with a bucket of tartar sauce and it’d be five minutes before you’d notice or care.
So, with a week before the wedding, Doyle must decide between the Bird sisters, contending with Cambridge’s jealous “just a friend” boy-pal Jimmie (Michael Cera), his sassy, all-seeing law partner Monique (Queen Latifah), the fussy gay wedding planner (Stanley Tucci), and his childhood friend and confidante Molly (Julia Roberts). Yes, you’ve seen this all before, from the
token sassy non-sexual black character, to the token fussy gay character, to the high-maintenance, put-upon modern woman, to the manic pixie dream girl, to the shy nerdy wallflower dude, to the hate-him-so-much-ya-love-him dissolute rake, to the patient and loyal secret crush. And more to the point, you’ve seen it just like this.
For six days, through the rehearsal dinner, pratfalls ensue as Doyle conspires to find ways to spend time alone with Cambridge. Just when Jessica is about to have her suspicions confirmed that her fiancé has been canoodling with her sister, Molly saves the day with a heartwarming alibi—the two of them have just been secretly planning a surprise that will make this the most epic wedding ever. Watching the couple make up, Molly chokes back a single, unselfish tear.
The alibi works until an hour before the church ceremony when Jessica gets lipstick on her veil and walks in on her sister and her fiancé dry-humping in the minister’s private bathroom. The wedding off, chaos ensues: Jimmie, heartbroken, abandons Cambridge at the church and returns to their college alone; Jessica throws all of Doyle’s possessions into the street outside their walkup; Cambridge tells Doyle that she had no idea that Jimmie was in love with her, and dashes back to college to make it up to him. After a torrent of Monique’s finger-wagging I-told-you-so’s, Doyle ends up in an all-night diner with his last friend in the world, his childhood pal Molly. Over burgers and shakes at three in the morning, he realizes that she’s the love of his life and slips the wedding ring on her finger. The music comes up and we realize that true love always wins in the end.
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