John Q
Dir: Nick Cassavetes
2002
**
Nick Cassavetes' John Q is a film I've been wanting to see for a long time. I don't know why it has taken me so long to watch it, but it was fifteen years before I did. I can't say it was worth the wait. I knew of the rough outline of the story, indeed, that is why I've wanted to see it for so long, but to see that they threw away such a great concept has come as something of a shock. Late to the party as ever but the subject of national healthcare is still predominant in American politics all these years later, so to have a film target it in this way is still striking. Denzel Washington plays John Q, the father of a young boy who unexpectedly collapses during a little-league game and is diagnosed with a degenerative condition that would require a heart-transplant for him to survive. Poor but working, John Q is told that his employers had  recently changed his benefits package without him knowing, so his health insurance doesn't cover such a procedure. With the strict private hospitals unwilling to budge and the welfare hospitals unable to cover the costs, John Q is left with very few options. Unable and unwilling to accept his child's fate, he takes things into his own hands and takes a heart surgeon and patients in an A&E department as hostage until his son is put on the heart donor register. It's a great idea that explores a very important question. When he soon realises that the only heart his son can acquire is his own, the idea gets even more interesting but is then dampened by the decision that the film had to be an action-thriller over anything else. It would have been more intelligent had John Q planned his hijacking and had done so within the transplant unit of the hospital. Nick Cassavetes film manages to insult both doctors, nurses, police officers and the emergency services in general, when really they should have looked into the health care industry owners and politicians. Any clever ethical questions asked are answered with meaningless gung-ho, thoughtless impulse and god-bothering silliness. Cassavetes didn't write the story but the film's heavy-handedness has his fingerprints all over it. The film was already full of emotion, he didn't need people to run in slow motion in order to tell them something they couldn't have just said over the phone. It makes a mockery of the serious issues raised. The film went from pointing out the ethical injustice of a child being denied available life-saving treatment to throwing out all logic by implying that everything is God's decision anyway and that fate is fate and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Ridiculous. Private healthcare is a sham, a racket that costs lives, put simply - the rich survive while the poor are discarded. There are countless stories of people getting into crippling debt, losing everything and losing loved ones because the cost of healthcare is too high. A film that highlights this should be welcome and challenging. As one short Bill Maher soundbite clip suggests, people need to wake up and recognize this and stop fighting against universal healthcare, the film would have been worth it had they explored this further. They actually endorsed a terrible approach to the situation, John Q never really looked like a person pushed to his absolute limits and maybe, just maybe he should have killed himself to give his heart to his son, at least then there would have been some meaning to the film, some really tangible emotion and something the audience could legitimately got tearful about. I found it to be poorly conceived, a brilliant idea utterly wasted while insulting good people and the intelligence of its audience.