When it comes to assisted suicide, it is possible to love the
sin and hate the sinner. That’s how many feel about Jack Kevorkian — plenty
of those who favor mercy killing draw the line at Dr. Death.
“You Don’t Know Jack: The Life and Deaths of Jack Kevorkian,” a film
on HBO on Saturday, tells the story
of Dr. Kevorkian, the Michigan pathologist who has, for better and for
worse, cemented his name to one of the more disturbing ethical issues of
our time. And by casting Al Pacino as Dr. Kevorkian, the creators have given
themselves an extra degree of difficulty.
A biographical film almost inevitably tilts in sympathy with its
subject; that’s why so many people object to any effort to cinematize Hitler’s life story or
Stalin’s. A credible biography of Dr. Kevorkian has to focus on the
self-serving zealotry beneath the martyr’s guise, but Mr. Pacino has a
subversive gift for tapping into the endearing underside of the most
despicable villains.
So it is a credit to Mr. Pacino that while he burrows deep into the
role, he never lets Dr. Kevorkian’s crackpot charm overtake the
character’s egomaniacal drive. Susan Sarandon, plain and bespectacled, is just as agile
as Janet Good, a local Hemlock Society leader who made common cause with
Dr. Kevorkian — despite his lack of social graces. And it is a credit
to the filmmakers that a movie dedicated to a fearless, stubborn man’s
campaign against the medical establishment and the criminal justice
system doesn’t overly romanticize his struggle or exonerate him from
blame.
No film about euthanasia, no matter how
sensitively written, can avoid offending one side or the other; at best,
both sides will find reason to complain. More important, “You Don’t
Know Jack” is a compelling, at times thrilling, tale that can absorb
even those with little interest or feeling for the subject. This is one
of the saddest, dreariest subjects imaginable, but “You Don’t Know Jack”
is anything but.
The two sides of the man nicknamed Dr. Death — his passion for the
right to die and his blinkered egotism — are presented up front. The
movie begins with Dr. Kevorkian peering through a glass window into a
hospital room, where an old woman tethered to life-support tubes looks
despairingly at him.
“You know, she had that same look of agony on her face, just like
Mother,” he says to his sister Margo (Brenda Vaccaro). “It’s not
living, you know, it’s not being alive.”
Moments later this retired pathologist is shown poring through books
about euthanasia in Europe, and planting his flag on the map of
scientific progress. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, I
was limiting myself,” he mutters.
Margo urges him on: “It will be your own field of specialty, Jack.
You’re going to need business cards, you know.”
The doctor’s desire to be recognized is one of the seeds of his
undoing, and the film doesn’t leave his outsize ambition unexplored.
Packing the back of his Volkswagen van with the bottles, tubes and metal
rods that make up what he calls “the mercitron,” to administer his
first assisted suicide, Dr. Kevorkian is buoyant.
“This is what you do it for, to be able to put your stamp on medical
history,” he tells his friend and helper, Neal Nicol (John Goodman).
Mr. Pacino is almost unrecognizable in a shock of puffy white hair
and oversize glasses: he looks like an elderly John Turturro. Speaking
in a flat Michigan accent, the actor manages to convey Dr. Kevorkian’s
placid tone and occasional flecks of dry humor without masking his
reckless indifference to public sentiment and professional caution. His
anger is chilling, as when he hangs up on Janet Good after she has
second thoughts about letting him use her house for his first assisted
suicide.
“There’s nothing further to be gained by talking to you,” he says,
banging down the phone.
“He had virtually no authentic human warmth” is how Jack
Lessenberry, one of the first reporters to interview Dr. Kevorkian and
who is portrayed in the film by James Urbaniak, described him in an article.
The film, directed by Barry Levinson, looks at times like a documentary,
inserting Mr. Pacino into real archival footage, including the infamous
1998 Mike Wallace segment on
“60 Minutes” that showed Dr. Kevorkian administering a lethal injection
to Thomas Youk and daring the
authorities to stop him.
They did. (He was convicted of a single charge of second-degree
murder in 1999, sentenced to a 10-to-25-year prison term, and was
released on parole for good behavior in 2007.)
Dr. Kevorkian taped his patients, creating a video record of their
concerns and consent, and a few of those poignant, real-life interviews
are also worked into the film. Others are skillful re-creations,
including scenes with his first patient, Janet Adkins, who at 54 was
only beginning to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease when she asked
Dr. Kevorkian to help her die.
“She looks well to me,” Kevorkian says to his sister after watching a
film of Mrs. Adkins. “She looks quite capable.”
Margo, relieved, agrees, adding, “She’s not the right one.”
Her brother bristles.
“But she has the right,” he retorts. “As a patient, it’s her choice.”
He begins shouting: “What do we care about the media? Who cares?”
Dr. Kevorkian, who cared deeply about explaining himself to the news
media, never seemed to understand, or care, how much his doctrinaire
rhetoric — comparing American treatment of the terminally ill to Nazi
experiments or describing the United States as totalitarian — hurt his
own cause. Nor did it help that he was so heedless of medical propriety,
second opinions or legal constraints, relying on a patient’s word and
his own judgment over anything else.
The film captures his zeal, his self-righteousness and also the
creepy tawdriness of his right-to-die practice: the macabre, ghastly art
works he painted himself, sometimes with his own blood; his shabby
apartment; his rickety DIY death contraptions; and the battered van he
used as a death chamber. Even Margo is shocked by how makeshift and
crude the process is, exclaiming after the first assisted suicide in his
van, “I guess somehow I just thought the whole thing would be nicer.”
Unpopular causes rarely find the most persuasive champions, and
sometimes only the least eloquent are willing to speak out. “You Don’t
Know Jack” takes a considered and insightful look at the frail, elderly
man whose embrace of death gave him a reason to live.
You Don’t Know Jack
The Life and Deaths of Jack
Kevorkian
HBO, Saturday night at 9, Eastern
and Pacific times; 8, Central
time. Directed by Barry Levinson; written by
Adam Mazer; Steve Lee Jones, Lydia
Dean Pilcher, Glenn Rigberg, Tom Fontana
and Mr. Levinson, executive producers;
Scott Ferguson, producer. Produced
by Bee Holder Productions, Cine
Mosaic and the Levinson/Fontana Company.
WITH: Al Pacino (Dr. Jack Kevorkian),
Susan Sarandon (Janet Good), Danny
Huston (Geoffrey Fieger), Brenda Vaccaro
(Margo Janus) and John Goodman
(Neal Nicol).