The Doctor

National Review, August 26, 1991 by John Simon

On a slightly, but only slightly, higher level, there is The Doctor. Here we have an eminent heart surgeon, Jack MacKee, played by William Hurt (better than Ford), who has become arrogant with success and affluence; his San Francisco lifestyle is the exact counterpart of Ford's New York one. Though he cures most of his patients, his cocky, wisecracking manner bruises their egos; his wife and son must live in their own worlds, too, at arm's length. Then Jack is diagnosed as having a malignant tumor in his throat. Though a patient at the hospital where he is a surgeon, he gets little or no special treatment. (Believe that who will.) Doctors, nurses, orderlies, other personnel either don't know him or don't fear him; he has to fill out endless forms, be roughly treated by various underlings (including a mistakenly meted out barium enema), put up with enforced waiting, rub shoulders with dying cancer patients, fear for his own vocal cords and life.

Though his withdrawn spouse, Anne (superbly played by Christine Lahti), tries to help, the coolness of the marriage proves an impediment. Instead, Hurt gets lessons in life and love from a doomed young brain-tumor patient, June, execrably played by Elizabeth Perkins. Under her shaved head beats a brain full of pantheism, epicureanism, and some kind of California Zen or EST; she introduces Hurt to his heart. He becomes so good that, leaving his worried wife uninformed about his whereabouts, he drives June, who wanted to cut loose once more, deep into the desert, there to dance all night by starligh and his car radio. In this kind of sentimental drivel, the two cannot have an affair. Instead, June discreetly dies, while Jack, thanks to a splendid operation by a formerly despised Jewish colleague, recovers and becomes more or less equally loving to his wife, son, and patients. He even laughingly imagines June as a guardian angel flying around above his house with--a particularly fine touch--her long hair fluttering about her shoulders.

The good people, again, are mostly women, blacks, Hispanics, and Jews. There is, to be sure, one not so good Jewish doctor, and the female throat specialist who helps save his life is as brusque with Jack as he was with his patients; but then along comes that good surgeon and Samaritan, Dr. Eli Blumfield, played with a sweet med-school look by the overyoung Adam Arkin. This is a sop to the elderly Dr. Ed Rosenbaum, on whose autobiographical A taste of My Own Medicine, the film is, astronomically distantly, based. When its producer, Laura Ziskin, was shown that book, in which Dr. Rosenbaum ungimmickily tells about how, after fifty years of doctoring, he learned some basics as a patient, she felt a compulsion to "do it." As Miss Ziskin, a former game-show writer and producer of the supremely dishonest Pretty Woman, puts it, "We knew we needed to change a lot of specifics." And, let me tell you, specifics fall like ninepins, or cancer patients, before Miss Z and her team ("everyone added something to the final product") are through.

I particularly relish the symbolic ending of this product, where Hurt performs a successful heart transplant on a Hispanic patient. When the latter's wife wonders (in Spanish) whether the donor had a good heart, her marido translates for Hurt's and the audience's benefit, and explains the Hispanic belief that what makes a true man is a good heart. The old Hurt would have had a corrosive comeback to that one; the new Hurt smiles and mutters a corroborative cutesiness. The film, by the way, was directed effectively and hankie-humidifyingly by Randa Haines, who also made that heart-melting tribute to the deaf, Children of a Lesser God. The God who watches over products such as these is anything but lesser.