Film on a Mission

By Katharine

Warnings: Rated G.

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From the very beginning of the moviemaking industry, a certain breed of film has slowly but surely carved itself a niche in the genre wall: the mission film. The mission film exists primarily to convey its central “message”—most often a call to righteousness, a note of caution, or a simple reminder of the important things in life. Whether inspired by actual events or drawn from an active imagination, this type of movie maintains a commitment to leave the viewer with fresh information and ideals, to hopefully be pondered long after the last scene plays out. In short, while obliged by its nature to keep an audience entertained, the mission film aims to touch the heart, teach the mind, and tap the spirit of the viewer.

Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) and John Q (2002), though fundamentally different in many respects, can both be considered mission films. They feature similar basic plot premises; in both movies, an ill child’s wellbeing is in some way jeopardized by the status quo of supposedly benevolent organizations. Based on a true story, Lorenzo depicts the ordeal of the indomitable Augusto and Michaela Odone, who struggle for many long months to find a cure for the debilitating adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) afflicting their son, Lorenzo. Along the way, the Odones face considerable obstruction in the form of the licensed medical establishment, which looks scornfully upon the findings of such “amateurs,” and refuses to seriously consider the new theories and treatments the Odones eventually develop. John, then, is the fictional tale of John Q. Archibald, who comes to realize that the administration of the local hospital is more interested in fetching revenue than in caring for his terminally ill son, Michael. In his desperation to procure a donor heart for the boy, John holds a hospital emergency room at gunpoint in hopes of forcing the hospital executives and the reluctant cardiologist to recall their oath-bound priority: “first do no harm.”

While both John and Lorenzo seek to impart virtually identical messages—specifically, “a truly loving parent would defy any convention in order to save his/her child” and “convention could use a little challenging now and again”—the two films utilize vastly divergent tactics, especially in their portrayals of their “villain” characters. John Q’s parent-versus-hospital conflict quickly devolves into a grossly clichéd “David and Goliath” scenario. The main “baddie” character, hospital administrator Rebecca Payne, seems to be more interested in upholding hospital policy than in the fate of one ill child, and possesses all the empathy of a block of ice. Granted, Payne’s cool indifference to young Michael’s plight is an effective foil to John Archibald’s paternal anxiety, but her two-dimensional insensitivity undermines all of her character’s plausibility. Payne even goes so far as to threaten to discharge Michael from the hospital if his parents cannot produce the heart transplant fee—a concept so unrealistic as to enter the realm of satire. Faced with a lack of believable peril, the viewer is hard-pressed to sympathize with any of the film’s protagonists, and John Q’s message is debunked by the audience’s doubt.

By contrast, Lorenzo’s Oil makes a marked effort to humanize its “bad guys,” lending them far more credibility. Professor Gus Nikolais, the given representative of the medical establishment, is portrayed as a skeptic throughout much of the movie; indeed, he repeatedly discourages Augusto and Michaela from what he sees as hasty, misguided “wild goose chases.” When confronted by the Odones for his ostensible callousness, however, he counters with the fact that his responsibility extends to hundreds of boys besides Lorenzo, and that he is not free to aimlessly pursue every hopeful thread that surfaces—much less a thread provided by non-professionals. Also, as Nikolais later tells Augusto in a moment of sincere empathy, “medicine is not like other sciences, and can appear…cold.” The professor is shown to be a man who genuinely cares about the boys he is trying to help, but who is perhaps too deeply entrenched in his methodology to think “outside the box,” so to speak. Thus, though he may be labeled an antagonist, Nikolais retains his three-dimensional fallibility as a human being, and the viewer can easily accept his role as a sympathetic adversary. Consequently, Lorenzo’s Oil is free to convey its message to an audience wholly caught up in the very human (and therefore very realistic) conflict.

In conclusion, Lorenzo’s Oil is a superior example of a mission film, one which manages to communicate its point without resorting to cardboard stereotypes or overblown arenas. John Q, by comparison, exhibits a thorough lack of attention to character believability and audience correlation, and so loses much of its capacity to truly reach the viewer. Though both films are certainly designed to evoke powerful emotional responses, Lorenzo is nowhere near the manipulative political mechanism that John is. In the end, the audience will be much more satisfied by Lorenzo’s veracity, humanity, and heart.

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Evaluating Essay written for Composition I.