Critical Care
How did I end up watching “Critical Care”? Good question. It was never a big screen hit, a cult hit, or any other kind of hit that I’m aware of. It’s one of those movies that I seemed to see every time I was at the video store. I would look at the box, and end up getting something else. But I kept looking at it, every time. Finally, I just took the bait and saw the movie.
As the movie opens, the cast credits begin to flash. James Spader and Kyra Sedgwick. Okay. Then; Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Wallace Shawn, Anne Bancroft. Director? Sidney Lumet. Even a concerto performed by Pinchus Zuckerman in the score. Now I’m intrigued. Cast packed with potential, and a widely renowned director. Could this be an overlooked little movie?
“Critical Care” begins with a very sleepy Dr. Werner Ernst (Spader) indulging in some light verbal banter with nurse Stella (Mirren). The good doctor is an overworked, exhausted resident who is working a 36 hour shift in the ICU. Interestingly enough, there seems to be no other staff in this very posh unit, just a resident and a single nurse, neither of whom seems to be doing much actual work. They talk of how becoming a doctor has turned Ernst from dork to dude, and is now acting on his new found supposed attractiveness. This is, I guess, supposed to be funny and satirical. It comes across as unfunny, pathetic, and insulting to every woman in the world with a brain. Enter Felicia (Sedgwick) the pretty woman who plays on all Ernst’s naivete, playing the part of “woman fawning over doctor”. Probably supposed to be parody. Comes off as simply bad acting and lame dialogue.
The actual plot is unnnecessarily complicated, contrived, and shallow (tough to pull off both complicated and shallow, yet this movie manages quite nicely). Two daughters (Sedgwick and Margo Martindale) are fighting over the care of their father, who is in a persistent vegetative state. One wants a feeding tube placed, the other doesn’t. Ernst sleeps with Felicia, says things he shouldn’t (a scene so painfully contrived and obvious that you feel sorry for the actors), and ends up in the middle of a lawsuit, all the while getting blackmailed by the wicked Felicia. All ridiculously calculated and obvious, from the callous lawyers to the greedy daughters. Albert Brooks is Dr. Butz, an alcoholic “emeritus” doctor, who can’t remember anything, and uses each meeting with Ernst to remind him that insurance is everything, and that they should perform all the procedures they can on the fully insured. Again, I suppose this is supposed to be over the top parody. It’s just irritating.
The film ends with the expected moral breakthrough, achieved with the assistance of an angelic nun (Bancroft) that leaves Ernst concerned only with the well-being of his patients, a new man, reinvigorated and redirected. Blech. All plots and subplots neatly wrapped up in about five minutes. No loose ends, no questions left unanswered.
The single redeeming feature of this otherwise dismal film is a weakly developed subplot involving Stella the nurse and a young dying patient. While everyone else is hyperactively engaged in litigation, back stabbing, ladder climbing and the like, Stella genuinely feels for her patient’s suffering and takes quiet steps to help. While the main plot is hitting us over the head with the same moral, this is the only section that has any hint of genuine feeling or subtlety. It’s not great, but it’s much better than the rest.
“Critical Care” is a lame attempt to take on the ailing health care system. Even though it was made in 1997, it talks about HMOs as if they were something new, and full insurance as if such a thing still existed. It’s fancy yet nearly deserted setting filled with futuristic labs and unfeeling doctors is stereotypic and anachronistic. Parody or not, it plays like an old episode of “Quincy”. By 1997, we were already well into the world of ER and the debate on the state of health care was fully established as a never ending topic. This movie treats it like a breakthrough subject and hands out enough sermons about the evils of insurance and the loss of the sanctity of medicine to gag a maggot.
Brooks is funny in his usual, slightly annoying way, despite the material he has to work with and the dreck that makes up his dialogue. Bancroft is wasted in her brief appearance, as is Wallace Shawn. Only Helen Mirren manages to rise above the material and allows us to care, at least a little, about her character. Both Spader and Sedgwick are basically, well, bad. Spader is unconvincing in virtually every scene (particularly embarrassing is his scene with Bancroft) and Sedgwick is so over the top ridiculous that she is nothing but a charicature. The message (“doctors should CARE!”) is so annoyingly omnipresent that I didn’t care if they care or not. The directing is uninspired, the score adds nothing, and the way the movie is shot is just plain bland.
Supposedly a darkly comic look at modern health care, instead “Critical Care” is an unfunny rehash of material better and more convincingly covered every week on television – and virtually everywhere else. The only way I would recommend this movie is in the context of “real bad movies”. Just don’t let it suck you in at the video store – resist, resist!!
