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"Rock-Solid" Film or Rock-Solid
Head? Part Three of Three By Dave Andrusko As a way of saying thank you to all who were kind enough to respond to my musings on the new HBO Jack Kevorkian movie, let me offer one more critic's take on the Barry Levinson-directed "You Don't Know Jack." He's Washington Post Style columnist Tom Shales, a relentlessly unpleasant fellow who always manages to draw the wrong conclusion.
To say that his style is hysterical is to dramatically understate the obvious. Consider the first paragraph of Shales's review of this "rock-solid and absorbing film" which is as out-to-lunch as almost anything I have ever read about a man convicted of second-degree murder. In the end, or near it, Jack Kevorkian put too much faith in the system. He threw himself at the mercy of the merciless. Maybe "faith" isn't a word one associates with the self-appointed Angel of Death who answered the prayers of the suffering, but an excess of it might have been his undoing -- and the reason he served eight years in prison rather than, as he had hoped, changing American law. I thought I had heard/read every silly excuse/justification for Kevorkian's rampage across Michigan, but, boy, was I wrong. Throughout the course of the review of Saturday's premier, Shales unmercifully trashes a prosecutor ("fanatical") the judge who finally sentenced Kevorkian ("an unsympathetic judge who metes out punishment with appalling fervor"), and those disability rights activists who know an enemy when they see one ("America's ever-ready nut fringe, members of which show up at his home in states of pietistic imbecility"). And those are his gentler remarks. In Shales's eyes, Kevorkian's real failure is a child-like innocence--trusting the system. This about a guy who the "system" exonerated over and over and over again, even as he grew more and more outrageous in "assisting" in over 130 suicides. Kevorkian, the ultimate American innocent, is drenched in "naivete" because he "thinks the logic and compassion in his mission will help him win out in the end." If Shales had a clue what he was writing about, he might appreciate the real irony--that in a real sense the system "failed" Kevorkian by not convicting him previously. Kevorkian grew so bold that he not only videotaped an assisted suicide in which he directly gave the man the lethal potion but then--just to rub it in prosecutors' faces--had it aired on "6o minutes"! Of course, what gave "You Don't Know Jack" its buzz is that Al Pacino starred as Kevorkian. Shales writes, "You Don't Know Jack" is really a testimonial to the perseverance and determination of two powerhouse individualists: Kevorkian and Pacino. Thanks to Pacino, we will remember Kevorkian more vividly than we ever would have otherwise -- almost as indelibly as his patients would remember him if they were still alive. Kevorkian exposed nothing in the legal system except how clever he was at manipulating it to serve his ends until he gave the "system" no choice but to respond. A man obsessed with death, he will live forever so long as there are useful dupes like Tom Shales. The review can be found at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042304913.html |
