By Beth Lambdin June 29, 2011 ( Volume 80 , No. 4 )

How to Die in Oregon (Rated PG)

I depart from theatrical releases to include this exceptional film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentaries at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Directed, produced and photographed by Peter Richardson, it premiered on HBO in late May, and is one to save in your Netflix queue or seek on demand. The movie provides something rarely seen on film: an intimate, thought-provoking, and emotional look at death, framed by Oregon’s controversial Death with Dignity Act, and personalized through the end-of-life stories of several participants, mostly the one of charismatic Cody Curtis.

 

Since Oregon passed the Act in 1994, according to the film, 500 Oregonians have used the law, which legalizes a “mentally competent, terminally ill patient’s choice to ingest medications to bring about a peaceful death.” The physician assists in the process, but the choice is the patient’s.

 

Roger Sagnel is No. 343, and the film opens with an unflinching look at his last minutes. He responds calmly and cogently to his physician’s required questions about what he’s doing. His final words thank his team, and the voters of Oregon for giving him what he clearly regards as a humane and empowering option.

 

The heart of the film beats with Cody Curtis. She is a 54-year-old wife and mother who went to her doctor suffering from a terrible stomachache. Dr. Katherine Morris, a compassionate healer, burst into tears when reviewing Cody’s test results. What she sees: a large, malignant mass on Cody’s liver, spelling doom. Cody undergoes surgery, suffers complications (and 50 days in the hospital) and recovers from that ordeal, but the cancer recurs. We meet Cody after she has been given six months to live. This dire prognosis really doesn’t spell doom, but instead takes Cody on a life-affirming journey that she would rather not take, but which nonetheless enriches her life (and death), the lives of her loved ones, and ultimately ours.

 

She, and we, the viewers, (feeling uncomfortably voyeuristic at times), struggle with BIG questions: What is the meaning of life? Why does it take dying to appreciate living more fully? Is there value and even nobility in suffering? Is it a sin to end one’s life? What is the nature of control? How do physicians reconcile the ramifications of the Act with the Hippocratic oath?

 

With a sharp intellect and easy access to her emotions, Cody articulately shares her challenges around those issues. When she strings together a number of good days, she wonders if perhaps her months aren’t numbered in single-digits. She’s in a curious limbo, but we also feel her relief when she says, “It’s my choice when to take them (the barbiturates that will end her life), whether to take them.”

 

In addition to Cody’s story, the film follows the trajectory of a grieving wife-cum activist, Nancy Niedzielski, a Seattle resident whose beloved husband died a gruesome death from brain cancer. After making a death-bed promise to her spouse, Nancy evolves into one of the driving forces behind the campaign in Washington to pass an act (I-1000), similar to Oregon’s. We also meet 53-year-old Randy Stroup, terminally ill with prostate cancer. Uninsured and with a lousy prognosis, he’s denied treatment, but offered a physician-assisted death; this just infuriates him. 

 

We also meet several volunteers, a cadre of dedicated and pragmatic individuals like Sue Dessayer Porter, trained to help their clients stay in charge of their own dying. They emphasize that they are not selling a process, but offering a choice – and clients always have the right to change their minds.  

 

The film gives time to those who object to the Act; groups and individuals who are just as adamant as the advocates about the “rightness” of their position. For them, moral or religious beliefs, or professional ethics relegate this action to the realm of sin, or as interference with God’s plan. Many of them say that they prefer that nature be allowed to run its course.

 

The film, while squarely in the advocacy camp, shows that choosing to end one’s life in this way is not an easy decision; it is not an easy way out; but a choice to be considered thoughtfully and reverently. The film challenges us to face our own mortality, and to consider just how we want to leave this earthly existence.

 

Midnight in Paris (Rated PG-13)

Woody Allen’s 41st film pays homage not only to one of his best “early” films, The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), but also to one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Paris. Striking at any time of the day, Paris receives especially loving caresses after the sun slips into the Seine. With a period soundtrack featuring Cole Porter, the story takes place in the present with midnight forays into the past, Paris of the roaring 20s. Owen Wilson, with charm and self-deprecation, plays Gil Pender, a successful Hollywood screenwriter (though he calls himself a “hack”) and frustrated novelist, who is visiting Paris with his harridan of a fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams in a thankless role). Gil is Allen at his most endearing; clever quips slip from his lips while he conveys wild-eyed wonder about his extraordinary circumstances. While Inez parties with her pedantic former professor (Michael Sheen), Gil ventures out for long evening strolls, losing himself in the winding streets of Paris. At the stroke of midnight, a vintage car full of revelers whisks him away into the raucous after-hours nightlife, brimming with 1920s luminaries. F. Scott Fitzgerald greets him as “Old Sport,” a manic Zelda unravels, a sloshed Hemingway spouts truisms, and Gertrude Stein takes him under her wing. Pablo Picasso broods while his muse and mistress, Ariana (Marion Cotillard), bewitches Gil. Their sweet, easy relationship contrasts sharply with the strained relationship he shares with Inez. Midnight, a whimsical tale, brims with nostalgia for a remarkable era. But, Gil is not stuck with a sack full of “what-ifs;” his unexpected gifts from the past may create a happier present.

 

The Hangover Part II (Rated R)

I admit it; I enjoyed 2009’s Hangover. While it was a stretch to find moral redemption in the film, a graphic portrayal of a drunken night of debauchery, I found the underlying pathos in Zach Galifianakis’s original portrayal of Alan, the bride-to-be’s brother, if not endearing, at least fascinating. He was an odd duck desperate to connect with his fellow homo sapiens, without any of the social graces that the well-adjusted take for granted.

 

In the sequel, he’s still the best thing about the film, but that’s faint praise. A repetitive, uninspired script, punctuated again with crude, explicit sexual “humor,” offers a few cheap laughs, but little else. The first Hangover was tasteless, but original; Part II is just tasteless.  

 

The same trio of best buds, Doug, Stu and Phil (Justin Bartha, Ed Helms and Bradley Cooper) are once again off to a wedding, but this time it’s in Thailand. Stolid, dentist Stu is tying the knot. Again, with reluctance, Alan is invited to join the “Wolf Pack,” and again he is responsible for the mayhem that ensues post-bachelor-party brunch. As in the original, the boys awake with a terrific hangover, amnesia about the previous night’s events, and a missing a member of their merry band, the brother of the bride-to-be. Once again, they must piece together just what transpired from a macabre string of clues: a severed finger, a torched bar, a silent monk – and a cigarette-smoking capuchin (replacing the 2009 hooker-baby). Did I say the film was redundant? To stave off boredom, gratuitous full-frontal shots of male privates are thrown in with the requisite bare-naked ladies. Run, don’t walk to the nearest exit.

 

Agree? Disagree? Let Beth know your views at beth@bethlambdin.com