1-28-10 Movie Review - Extraordinary Measures

Tonight The Tallgrass Film Festival and WSU's International Education Office, in conjunction with the Gordan Parks Exhibit at WSU, will show "Afghan Star," a documentary about the return of pop culture to Afghanistan. It shows at 7 P.M. tonight at the CAC Theatre in WSU's Rhatigan Student Center. The regular Tallgrass Third Thursday series returns next month.

Friday's entry at the Murdock is a doozy. The Triplets of Belleville is an extraordinary caricatured animation about a trio of old ladies who used to be a singing sensation back in the thirties but who are now involved in rescuing a kidnapped bicycle racer from the Mafia in France; it's a Canadian/Belgian/French movie, but it has very little dialogue, so you won't have to read much and can concentrate on the elaborate drawing style, which is hilarious all by itself; there are also suggestions of Buster Keaton, Jaques Tati, and the old Max Fleischer cartoons that used to compete with Disney. Showing of The Triplets of Belleville is 7:30 tomorrow, Friday, at the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway, and I can just about guarantee that you won't see anything like it anyplace in support.

And commercially, we have something much more conventionally done but well enough done to be satisfying in Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser, with Keri Russell in support.

Extraordinary Measures is a pretty conventional disease-of-the-week movie about the efforts of scientist Ford to save the children of Fraser and Russell from a rare and invariably fatal disease called Pompe, before time runs out. The biggest problem with it is the incredible ability of Fraser, who is not presented as any kind of phenomenon, to raise millions of dollars and set up medical and research institutions against obstacles that are very sparely indicated to exist but never explained enough to make the problems clear. We are not invited to wonder how much of scarce resources should be dedicated to a diseases that could use the talents of Fraser and the man who is presented as a genius, Harrison Ford.

Ford is that standard curmudgeonly self-centered scientific genius who is more concerned with the scientific problem than with the human situation; he won't cooperate with other researchers, and not being one who deals with patients, he is not much aware of human suffering of any kind except his own frustrations with things and people that stand in his way. On the one hand, Fraser has to deal with huge corporations and people with interests of their own, and on the other hand, with this quite unattractive man who is his only hope. Perhaps the book The Cure, by Greta Anand, would tell us more about how these problems were brought together; but Extraordinary Measures claims only to be, quote, "INSPIRED BY true events," so I wouldn't bet on it. But give the movie credit for at least suggesting some of the issues involved in dealing with obscure diseases while millions die of heart afflictions. Movies are not the ideal genre for dealing with large, complicated issues, are not the ideal genre for dealing with large, complicated issues, and our focus is on one family with two sick kids.

The kids are unconventionally ideal, and their illness is like those of Ali McGraw in Love Story or Greta Garbo in Camille: it leaves no traces on the face or disposition, though in this case it does put the kids in wheelchairs for the few years they can live.

Extraordinary Measures is a tearjerker that didn't jerk me a lot but did put me into uncomfortable suspense; others will probably be affected both ways, and need not feel unjustified.