Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 22, 2010 8:31 pm 
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Fighting Big Pharma to save the kids

Extraordinary Measures is based on a true story of a Big Pharma executive and venture capitalist who pushed for a cure for an inherited disease that was going to kill two of his young children. Harrison Ford isn't particularly convincing as a brilliant, solitary scientist, and Brendan Fraser is too soft and weepy for the venture capitalist dad. The music is soppy, the images are without character and a little washed out, and the story verges on movie-of-the-week formulaic. But the director, Tom Vaughan (What Happens in Vegas), has created a balance so that instead of being just another tear-jerker medical melodrama this is a movie that teaches you something about how the world works. You get the adorable dying kids and the doting, desperate parents, but the drama of how a commercial lab functions may be the more exciting and interesting one, and gets more screen time.

Hollywood sees Harrison as a sexy old guy, but he's become so locked into curmudgeonly roles he seems every bit his sixty-seven years. Fraser has retired from being a comical hunk (Encino Man, George of the Jungle) to forty-something pudginess: he's a tall man with a soft face and a bit of a gut. This is in part a buddy picture about how an unlikely male couple bonds. Crusty biochemist Robert Stonehill (Ford, playing a composite figure tailored to his needs) and mid-level Birstol-Myers Squibb executive John Crowley (Fraser) find each other, because two of Crowley's children (he has an older boy who's healthy) have been diagnosed with Pompe disease, a rare and fatal neuromuscular disorder in which children's organs and muscles degenerate due to an inability to process glycogen. Crowley finds Stonehill in Nebraska, with a brilliant theory about an enzyme cure, but without the dough to get it ready for clinical trials.

So Crowley leaves Birstol-Myers Squibb and starts an independent research company for Stonehill. But then that isn't working fast enough, so he decides to sell his company to a bigger corporation that can provide more researchers and more labs. This makes both men rich but also makes Stonehill furious; he wasn't consulted. Stonehill drives a Ford truck, wears Wrangler jeans and a blue blazer and carries a metal attaché case, yells a lot, kicks people out of his lab, and plays loud rock music there, indifferent to his neighbors.

But a more fundamental conflict for Crowley is that corporate executive Dr. Kent Webber, a hard-nosed and unfriendly M.D. played by Jared Harris, sets up four research teams, and wants them to work separately and competitively. Why not share their findings? And for Crowley, despite his differences with Stonehill, he's the man who's going to find the enzyme. But Crowley has to deal with the corporate hierarchy, with an even scarier guy called Erich Loring (Patrick Bauchau) as CEO.

The teams, with Stonehill's approval, arrive at an enzyme worthy of clinical trial. The Crowley kids, Megan (Meredith Droeger) and Patrick (Diego Velazquez) are in wheel chairs now with aids to their breathing, but their dad and mom (Keri Russell) entertain them with birthday parties and computer games and beach picnics. They live in a very large house thanks to the success of venture capital. On the beach dad gets a call from the chilly Dr. Webber: sorry, your kids can't be in the trial, because it will be restricted to the very young. And don't fight this: as a company executive, you have a clear conflict of interest.

How this turns out is part of the movie's climax and though the ending brings tears to your eyes if you respond to adorable tykes in hospital beds, it is more about how scientists battle businessmen in the American drug system, and how the tricky protocols of clinical trials work for individuals and for the society. Vaughan conveys a sense of the parents' devotion, but downplays their difficulties in surviving as a couple under such stress. Poor John Jr. (Sam Hall), the older boy, has a pretty small role to play here too.

If the film is just above the generic, the material is special. With its name stars and emotional story that gives a human face to drug research, Extraordinary Measures may have a chance of making people more aware not only of glycogen storage disease, but of the conflicted apparatus that arrives at cures. The movie is based on Boston reporter Geeta Anand's book, The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million - And Bucked the Medical Establishment - in a Quest to Save His Children and the story is quite recent; the book came out in 2006 and the drug Myozyme for the treatment of Pompe disease became available in 2007.

Don't go to Extraordinary Measures looking for cinematic art. But don't be too brutal with it either. It conveys worthwhile information.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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