“Of Medicine and Miracles” could have been a podcast. It could have been a newspaper feature. It could have been a book, even. It didn’t need to be a documentary. Saying so brings me no pleasure; dumping Ross Kauffman’s latest into the same bucket as countless modern docs that don’t justify themselves as cinema feels brutish, given the subject matter. The story of how the immunologist Carl June figured out how to train T cells to fight cancer, and how his research ultimately saved young Emily Whitehead, sentenced with a mortal leukemia diagnosis at six years old, is remarkable and moving, and worth attending even a decade after her miraculous full remission.
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But that story translates blandly from life to screen, quite possibly because journalists gave Whitehead’s journey toward near-death and ultimately, miraculously, recovery in print years ago. “Of Medicine and Miracles” is a Google-Wikipedia project: Everything and anything you want to know about June, about Whitehead, about her parents, Tom and Kari, can be found with basic search tools on the Internet. Kauffman at least grants the Whiteheads and June the opportunity to bare their souls and revisit the events that changed their lives and, yes, without hyperbole, the world; this elevates the picture to a degree, increases our exposure and proximity to their struggle, and shows the audience something they can’t track down quite as easily by their own sleuthing.
It’s in these scenes that “Of Medicine and Miracles” comes closest to feeling like a movie rather than a report. Tom, Kari, and June, in Kauffman’s talking head interviews, get to unburden themselves in a setting, not unlike a confessional. The catharsis is palpable. So is their pain. June, we learn, lost his first wife to cancer, and his grief became the jet fuel propelling him toward the goal of curing the disease for good; by contrast, Tom and Kari were inspired by their own near-loss experience to establish a foundation to help finance further research into cancer treatment. With Kauffman, they pick at old wounds, which haven’t fully healed despite Emily’s survival. Increasingly they show their vulnerability, leading to their separate recollections of an argument they had over which hospital was best equipped to administer to their daughter’s needs and heal her. We get the sense, if only briefly, that what happened to Emily and the toll the trauma took on them cracked open fissures in their marriage.
They made it as surely as Emily did, but “Of Medicine and Miracles” demonstrates how much strain terminal illness puts on a family. Watching the film as one without children or matrimony may stir grief through basic empathy; watching the film as one with both means grief is inevitable. It is impossible not to imagine, as a parent, what we might do in the Whiteheads’ circumstances; it’s impossible not to bear a form of guilt, the kind we feel considering the travails of others, and which leads us to ask, “Why them? Why not us? How werewe spared by the luck of the draw?”
Kauffman surely does not intend for viewing parents to feel this psychic whiplash. He’s not judging, or shaming, or conveying the message that as bad as we think we have it, someone else always has it worse. But “Of Medicine and Miracles” does invite us to see ourselves in the Whiteheads’ mercifully resolved plight by the nature of its material. No anguish exists that tops the loss of a child, even the loss of a spouse, though surely they come close to one another in ranking the Suffering Olympics. What the movie puts us through by exposing us to this narrative where desperation meets hope is as memorable as it is profound.
Kauffman does not lack for rich veins of emotional material. His problem is structural rather than substantial. “Of Medicine and Miracles” is mundane in construction and conception. The film has long missed its moment, arriving so many years since June’s interventions plucked Emily from death’s amoral grip. She should be remembered and celebrated, of course, and her mom and dad’s Herculean labors to care for her should be lauded. But that doesn’t make “Of Medicine and Miracles” a movie to laud or celebrate. It is nearly a literal demonstration of “too little too late” in action. Worse than that: It’s too perfunctory. [C-]
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