Diseased Desires

Extraordinary Measures Directed by Tom Vaughan Runtime: 105 min.

Red Beard Directed by Akira Kurosawa At Film Forum Feb. 2

Only Hollywood would try to turn exploitation into inspiration.The real-life story of corporate executive John Crowley striving to save the lives of his two children afflicted with a little-known form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe disease becomes Extraordinary Measures. Despite ads that explicitly coattail the current hit film The Blind Side, this is a soft-sell, lowpressure film with far fewer images of sick kids than expected—and no villain.Yet this fairly tasteful movie manages to shift perspective from Crowley’s remarkably unflappable heroism to a contest that ultimately suggests a laboratory/boardroom Rocky.

Under ordinary circumstances this deserves moderate acclaim, yet Extraordinary Measures opens during week four of Film Forum’s Akira Kurosawa retrospective which brings back the Japanese filmmaker’s 1960 masterpiece Red Beard (showing Feb. 2), an unflinching medical drama about a 19thcentury physician who runs a clinic in a poor village. It opens up vast, humbling dramas of existence, struggle—and the limits of science. A two-part epic with an intermission, Red Beard so absolutely dwarfs Extraordinary Measures that the new film’s modest virtues now seem like sugar-pill placebo.

Against the risk of putting off prospective viewers, the makers of Extraordinary Measures present its chronicle of Crowley’s tenacity and optimism through standard, commercial means of tension and resolution. Each scene recounts how Crowley (played by Brendan Fraser) researched Pompe Disease, enlisted a maverick biochemist Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford) and then bootstrapped a corporation to sponsor the necessary research.

This impressive adventure could open up some sense of the Hypocratic ineffable, like King Vidor’s 1938 film of A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel, but contemporary Hollywood distrusts spirituality as ignoble sentiment. Instead, Extraordinary Measures stays methodical.

Working toward an unflashy but satisfying medical breakthrough (a finale as unpretentious as a child sitting up straight or taking its first steps), Extraordinary Measures stays plain and simple.This defies the idiocy of “spoilers” because its substance isn’t based on suspense or surprise. But a better movie would have made an elevated perspective part of its aesthetic—that’s one of the elating aspects of Kurosawa’s Red Beard: Its view of the human condition is, by necessity, large and vibrant.

Director Tom Vaughan displays a frustrating stylistic blandness too much like a made-for-TV movie—even though fewer people can recognize the distinction these days. Crowley and Stonehill’s partnership (an Ivy League go-getter depending on an irascible loner) is unorthodox but barely a clash of egos.Vaughan’s even-tempered storytelling absorbs their differences—plus bythe-book objections of the larger Zymagen Pharmaceutical company exec (Jared Harris)—into a too-placid narrative.

Vaughan’s tasteful reticence is no doubt intended to sidestep the exuberant style of George Miller’s 1993 medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil (also about a real-life family’s efforts to cure their child’s disease). Miller’s technique sometimes seemed unserious—as if his own exultation overrode the parents’ personal triumph.Yet, Lorenzo’s Oil stays vivid in memory while Extraordinary Measures blurs even while you’re watching it into something old-fashioned that had commercial breaks (an unfortunate result of an emphatic music score).

George Miller struggled to redefine heroism from the muscularity of his Mad Max series to intellectual agility. Brendan Fraser has played his share of big-screen swagger (The Mummy, Journey to the Center of the Earth) but Crowley’s nice-guyness needs more tension and athleticism. Likable Fraser is allowed to be unaccountably flabby. Harrison Ford sidesteps the limelight; Stonehill, the hard-rock listening scientist, is virtually a supporting role without grandstanding.Yet, Ford’s most commanding scene could be an Indiana Jones moment—dismissing an annoying scientist by gruffly repeating “Shoo!” That all-American directive has lots in common with Sandra Bullock’s authentic cunning at the core of The Blind Side, where heroism receives an everyday definition. The Blind Side clarifies something extraordinary while Extraordinary Measure isn’t cinematic enough to do justice to human goodness.

In Red Beard, Kurosawa finds profundity in the mundane occurrences of a young and old doctor’s observations.Their relationship reflects Extraordinary Measures as much as the doctor and crook symbiosis of Drunken Angel. But Red Beard (from the name given Mifune’s veteran surgeon) goes further, looking at the inevitable prospect of death and then examining the life complexities preceding it. Kurosawa sums up ideas in both Drunken Angel and Ikiru. His greatness has nothing to do with Hollywood’s exploitative notion of “inspiration;” it’s an artistic endeavor to understand the ineffable.

Kurosawa’s exhilarating style addresses a confounding subject: “Medical science doesn’t know everything.We know the symptoms.We can only fight poverty and ignorance and cover up what we don’t know.” Art transcends ignorance as in Kurosawa’s elegant, superb focus of the CinemaScope frame on intimate subjects. His famous telephoto lens collapses distance between figures separated in space and charges it with feelings: cruelty, sadness, beauty, regret, potential. All the things Tom Vaughan has yet to learn.

As in Kurosawa’s best films, Red Beard recalls how major playwrights and novelists used to write: greatness came from the completeness of human experience they relayed.

Kurosawa’s widescreen is Altman-like; it includes different characters, points of view and shares with Altman’s telephoto lens the desire to encapsulate more of the world, more individual and social experience, to situate the person within a literally wider view of life.