If TV has taught us anything about the fictional medical community, it’s that hospitals are hotbeds for sentimentalism and juicy melodrama. The God Committee, which due to its exposition-heavy dialogue can feel like an episode of television at times, revolves around a group of five cardiology professionals who purport to make their life-and-death decisions free of emotion. Specifically, the committee decides who gets a new heart.
If you’ve happened to wonder what Kelsey Grammer, Julia Stiles or Janeane Garofalo are up to lately, look no further. Respectively, they play the cantankerous Dr. Boxer, the up-and-coming Dr. Taylor and the snarky head-honcho Dr. Gilroy. Together with the cautious psychiatrist Dr. Lau (Peter Kim) and no-nonsense Dr. Wilkes (Patricia R. Floyd), they convene to decide which of three various patients ticks the most boxes for a new ticker. Of course, one of the patients may have a bit of a leg up on the competition, as he’s the son of a powerful man named Granger (Dan Hedaya) who just so happens to be willing to donate $25 million to the hospital. Meanwhile, the committee is rife with secrets, as Boxer and Taylor had been shacking up together and Gilroy is willing to fudge some details to get her cardiology unit those sweet, sweet donations.
The committee’s deliberations over the new transplant recipient are meant to take place over one hour, which is broken up by a non-linear storyline that frequently jumps to scenes seven years in the future. Boxer has left the hospital to join the private sector (bankrolled by Granger, no less) where he is pioneering methods to keep human organs alive in pigs and baboons. In the modern day, he’s lost hair and is deathly pale, the former attribute a convenient way for the viewer to tell the two timelines apart and the latter a result of the fact that he is quite ill.
The frequent shifts between timelines come off as somewhat jarring and contrived, but it’s easy enough to see why the film is laid out this way. Writer-director Austin Stark adapted this script from a play by Mark St. Germain, and without these jumps to the future, the story is little more than a bottle episode in a hospital conference room. The script is laden with exposition that’s nevertheless kept on life support by a game cast, which also includes Colman Domingo as Father Dunbar, a priest who works as a middleman of sorts between the various interests at play. Grammer and Stiles have good chemistry, even though most of their interactions are prickly with an subtext of longing, and Stiles especially excels as the film’s emotional center, yet one who nevertheless is coming to terms with the fact that medical decisions often must rely on cold, hard facts.
The story told in The God Committee presumably made a good play, and would likely make for above-average TV, but as a feature film it feels slight even given the life-or-death subject matter. Boxer and Taylor’s interpersonal entanglements take up far too much space within a film that could otherwise be more about the challenges and shortcomings of the medical industry rather than melodramatic interactions of the people in it. Overall, the heavy burden the committee must carry in making such life-altering decisions seems to play second fiddle to a script that can’t get out of its own way, involving characters who hem and haw far more than they take decisive action.
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