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Extraordinary Measures
Desperate Father’s Plea to a Detached Scientist
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 22, 2010
“Extraordinary Measures,” a movie about a medical breakthrough, is not especially eager to break new ground of its own. Directed with care and competence by Tom Vaughan (“What Happens in Vegas”), the film hews closely to familiar themes and patterns. One strand is a drama about a family in crisis, with parents facing the illness and possible death of two of their children, who suffer from a fatal genetic disorder. Another piece is a buddy picture, in which a mismatched pair of guys — one earnest and emotive (Brendan Fraser), the other gruff and solitary (Harrison Ford) — set off on an unlikely adventure, hoping to find a cure.
But also, and more unusually, the film, adapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs from a nonfiction book by the journalist Geeta Anand, is an examination of how medical research is conducted and financed. This is the main reason that “Extraordinary Measures,” the first feature released by CBS Films, rises above some of its made-for-TV trappings. (The presence of established big-screen stars doesn’t hurt either.)
The storytelling and the visual style are rarely more than workmanlike, and the big scenes arrive punctually and are played with minimal nuance. But the dogged, unflashy presentation of emotionally charged, complicated material works to the film’s advantage. The lump-in-the-throat elements take care of themselves — the sight of sweet and lively children in hospital beds has a way of opening up audience tear ducts, even without swelling musical cues — but the startling thing about “Extraordinary Measures” is not that it moves you. It’s that you feel, at the end, that you have learned something about the way the world works.
Mr. Fraser, his eternal boyishness comfortably expanding in a pudgy 40-something frame, plays John Crowley, a midlevel executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb whose two younger children, a son and a daughter, suffer from a rare, inherited form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe’s disease. (The oldest son, played by Sam M. Hall, is unaffected).
John and his wife, Aileen (Keri Russell), do their best to give Megan (Meredith Droeger) and Patrick (Diego Velazquez), who use wheelchairs and breathing tubes, a normal life, with bowling alley birthday parties and trips to the beach. After the rest of the family has gone to bed, John rifles through scholarly journals and trawls the Internet, searching for some inkling of a cure and wondering how much time Megan and Patrick have left.
His inquiries lead him to Robert Stonehill, a University of Nebraska professor played with sublime cantankerousness by Harrison Ford (and a composite character based on several scientists portrayed in Ms. Anand’s book). Motivated by sheer scientific curiosity, and impelled by a stubborn, go-it-alone work ethic, Stonehill thinks he has isolated an enzyme that has the potential to arrest the progress of Pompe’s disease, which usually kills its victims at the age of 8 or 9.
Crowley impulsively promises to finance Stonehill’s experiments and hurriedly sets up a foundation for that purpose. But they soon abandon the nonprofit route and put together a start-up company in the middle of the prairie. This requires tense visits with venture capitalists (including one played by the ever-silky David Clennon and then a plan, resisted by Stonehill, to sell out to a big biotechnology firm in Seattle.
The evolution of their business plan, along with the pursuit of the treatment that will save Megan and Patrick, is what holds “Extraordinary Measures” together. This is not to say that the movie is a bloodless scientific procedural. Crowley’s visits home, and Ms. Droeger’s adorable spunkiness, prevent that. But the film resists the temptation to turn into a full-blown family melodrama. There are tensions and stresses between John and Aileen, but they also deal with an awful situation in the matter-of-fact, practical way that loving parents often do, and the film is all the more moving because, for the most part, it understates their grief and anxiety.
And the temperamental contrast between Stonehill and Crowley is also handled without too much exaggeration, though of course there are the requisite scenes of seething and shouting and storming in and out of offices. The desperate father’s impatience is often at odds with the scientist’s detachment, but “Extraordinary Measures” is ultimately about how feeling and objectivity can work together, and also about how the protocols of medical research and development can both enable and obstruct progress.
While there is one corporate heavy — an executive played by Jared Harris — he is less a villain than the embodiment of a way of doing business that both Crowley and Stonehill must contend with. And even if he seems hard-hearted and bureaucratic in his insistence on conducting experiments and clinical trials by the book, the filmmakers don’t suggest that he’s entirely wrong. Nor do they offer a simplistic account, either scolding or celebratory, of the relationship between big money and medical progress. The result, while nothing extraordinary, is nonetheless satisfying.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/22...tml?ref=movies
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 22, 2010
“Extraordinary Measures,” a movie about a medical breakthrough, is not especially eager to break new ground of its own. Directed with care and competence by Tom Vaughan (“What Happens in Vegas”), the film hews closely to familiar themes and patterns. One strand is a drama about a family in crisis, with parents facing the illness and possible death of two of their children, who suffer from a fatal genetic disorder. Another piece is a buddy picture, in which a mismatched pair of guys — one earnest and emotive (Brendan Fraser), the other gruff and solitary (Harrison Ford) — set off on an unlikely adventure, hoping to find a cure.
But also, and more unusually, the film, adapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs from a nonfiction book by the journalist Geeta Anand, is an examination of how medical research is conducted and financed. This is the main reason that “Extraordinary Measures,” the first feature released by CBS Films, rises above some of its made-for-TV trappings. (The presence of established big-screen stars doesn’t hurt either.)
The storytelling and the visual style are rarely more than workmanlike, and the big scenes arrive punctually and are played with minimal nuance. But the dogged, unflashy presentation of emotionally charged, complicated material works to the film’s advantage. The lump-in-the-throat elements take care of themselves — the sight of sweet and lively children in hospital beds has a way of opening up audience tear ducts, even without swelling musical cues — but the startling thing about “Extraordinary Measures” is not that it moves you. It’s that you feel, at the end, that you have learned something about the way the world works.
Mr. Fraser, his eternal boyishness comfortably expanding in a pudgy 40-something frame, plays John Crowley, a midlevel executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb whose two younger children, a son and a daughter, suffer from a rare, inherited form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe’s disease. (The oldest son, played by Sam M. Hall, is unaffected).
John and his wife, Aileen (Keri Russell), do their best to give Megan (Meredith Droeger) and Patrick (Diego Velazquez), who use wheelchairs and breathing tubes, a normal life, with bowling alley birthday parties and trips to the beach. After the rest of the family has gone to bed, John rifles through scholarly journals and trawls the Internet, searching for some inkling of a cure and wondering how much time Megan and Patrick have left.
His inquiries lead him to Robert Stonehill, a University of Nebraska professor played with sublime cantankerousness by Harrison Ford (and a composite character based on several scientists portrayed in Ms. Anand’s book). Motivated by sheer scientific curiosity, and impelled by a stubborn, go-it-alone work ethic, Stonehill thinks he has isolated an enzyme that has the potential to arrest the progress of Pompe’s disease, which usually kills its victims at the age of 8 or 9.
Crowley impulsively promises to finance Stonehill’s experiments and hurriedly sets up a foundation for that purpose. But they soon abandon the nonprofit route and put together a start-up company in the middle of the prairie. This requires tense visits with venture capitalists (including one played by the ever-silky David Clennon and then a plan, resisted by Stonehill, to sell out to a big biotechnology firm in Seattle.
The evolution of their business plan, along with the pursuit of the treatment that will save Megan and Patrick, is what holds “Extraordinary Measures” together. This is not to say that the movie is a bloodless scientific procedural. Crowley’s visits home, and Ms. Droeger’s adorable spunkiness, prevent that. But the film resists the temptation to turn into a full-blown family melodrama. There are tensions and stresses between John and Aileen, but they also deal with an awful situation in the matter-of-fact, practical way that loving parents often do, and the film is all the more moving because, for the most part, it understates their grief and anxiety.
And the temperamental contrast between Stonehill and Crowley is also handled without too much exaggeration, though of course there are the requisite scenes of seething and shouting and storming in and out of offices. The desperate father’s impatience is often at odds with the scientist’s detachment, but “Extraordinary Measures” is ultimately about how feeling and objectivity can work together, and also about how the protocols of medical research and development can both enable and obstruct progress.
While there is one corporate heavy — an executive played by Jared Harris — he is less a villain than the embodiment of a way of doing business that both Crowley and Stonehill must contend with. And even if he seems hard-hearted and bureaucratic in his insistence on conducting experiments and clinical trials by the book, the filmmakers don’t suggest that he’s entirely wrong. Nor do they offer a simplistic account, either scolding or celebratory, of the relationship between big money and medical progress. The result, while nothing extraordinary, is nonetheless satisfying.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/22...tml?ref=movies