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Denzel Washington is nominated for a 2001 Academy Award for his performance in Training Day. John Q, unfortunately, does not follow that pattern. Here, Washington is hampered by a static script.

John Q. (the character's middle name is Quincy) is your average American with wife (Kimberly Elise) and one child (Daniel E. Smith). Circumstances are against him at every turn with his job not meeting family expenses, unsuccessful job searches, repossession of a car, and the final blow---his son's collapse at a baseball game. The son needs a heart transplant, and insurance won't cover it, nor will John's efforts to raise the needed cash. What to do? In this story, John takes part of the hospital and staff (James Woods and Anne Heche) hostage and demands that his son's name be placed on the heart transplant list. Pronto. Enter the hostage negotiator (Robert Duvall) and publicity-hungry police chief (Ray Liotta) and you have a plot out of a television series.

The opening scene of the film telegraphs what is going to happen. The problem from that point on with John Q's script is that it makes its points with a sledgehammer. Director Cassavetes lays it on with a trowel instead of a cotton swab. About the only misfortune that didn't happen to John Q before the hospital situation was a roof collapse. Once inside the sterile walls of the hospital, he meets the usual people: A doctor who won't give in and a hospital administrator with starched backbone. The other hostages, including Eddie Griffith, are window dressing although James Woods actually studied to be an eye surgeon before becoming an actor and looks natural in a hospital setting.

Social issues we read about daily are brought out in John Q. No job, no insurance, and then who pays the bills? There never are enough donors for transplants and it is a heart-breaking situation for all concerned. The media is hyper-alert to any type of news story. Tried to find a new job lately? With lay-off's around the country, it is increasingly difficult, and one may have to discover new traits in themselves to find something suitable. If we had national health insurance coverage, the script of John Q would not have been written, but ultimately, this is supposed to be a love story between father and son. Unfortunately, all this father does to address these societal and personal issues is resort to violence. Oh, that John Q had better material for the actors to work with. As a final aside, John Q was filmed in Canada to cut production costs. Let the ironies roll on.

Copyright 2002 Marie Asner 2/20/2002

The message movie is an endangered species. Though conservative demagogues are correct that Hollywood is a largely liberal town, that left-ward bias rarely makes itself felt in mainstream films. In fact, movies are one of the more conservative art forms, consistently reinforcing middle-American values such as the importance of marriage, hard work, business, and raising children. True, movies sometimes push the boundaries in terms of language or violence, but they almost never push the boundaries of people's basic
convictions. I mean, when was the last time Hollywood released a big anti-war or anti-business movie? A movie sometimes targets a particular business practice (Erin Brockovich, for example), but it's usually
something egregious that we can all condemn. The basic capitalist structure is sacrosanct. And the rare political movie tends to attack things most people hate anyway: corruption in government or politicians too influenced by polls.

So it was interesting to watch John Q last weekend, the new movie starring Denzel Washington. Here is a movie that has a message it wants to send, one with which not everyone will be comfortable.

John Archibald (Washington) is a happily-married man with a young son named Michael who wants to be a bodybuilder. John is a hard worker, but his hours have been cut back at the factory where he works, and his wife Denise (Kimberly Elise) only has an entry-level job at the supermarket. He's out looking for work, but jobs are hard to come by; and soon one of his two old cars is being repossessed. But John still has a loving wife, good friends, his inter-racial church, and an adoring son.

Life takes a hard turn one day, though, when Michael collapses rounding first base in a Little League game. John and Denise rush him to the nearest hospital, and it turns out Michael's heart is enlarged and in danger of failing completely. His only hope is a transplant, but John and Denise don't have the $250,000 to cover the operation. They have health insurance, but John's reduction to part-time status has reduced his coverage as well, and heart transplants aren't on the list.

The film does a nice job of showing John and Denise's efforts to get the money and their slowly-growing desperation: They go to various banks, they try to apply for welfare or Medicaid, they pass the plate at church and at work. They get enough to help pay for Michael's hospital bills but nowhere near enough for the operation itself. And those insensitive hospital administrators (played by Anne Heche and James Woods) aren't any help at all.

As Michael's condition deteriorates, John gets desperate, so desperate, in fact, that he takes one administrator hostage and barricades himself in the emergency room, threatening to kill everyone if his son doesn't receive a new heart. What follows is a fairly standard-issue hostage drama. John negotiates with caring cop Robert Duvall and callous police chief Ray Liotta, all while hashing out what's wrong with America's health care system with the people he's holding hostage.

Holding all of this together is Denzel's rock-solid performance. It's not Oscar-worthy like his role in Training Day, but Washington glides through the treacle he's often forced to spout and then nails his big scenes. He's also genuinely believable as a blue-collar worker at the end of his rope. Since most movies focus on the higher economic strata, it was refreshing to see a factory worker as the main character.

The other acting performances aren't anything to write home about. Though it's a top-notch cast, it's not top-notch material, and Liotta and Heche are overwhelmed by the strawmen they're asked to play. Even Robert Duvall just has to stand around looking concerned. Kimberly Elise and Daniel Smith (as Michael) are fine, though, with Smith doing a nice personification of 'cute'.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of dross in John Q. As I mentioned to my friend Garth afterwards, the movie lays it on a bit thick at times. And though it seemed to wring tears and sniffles out of the people around me, I found myself growing more and more uncomfortable in the movie's "big moments." And Hollywood's insistence on a particular type of ending rings completely false.

But back to that message, which the movie goes out of its way to emphasize in the final reel. Yes, John Q does place a fair amount of blame on the expected villains of greedy hospitals and HMOs, but it doesn't stop there. It goes out of its way to confront us in the audience with our own complicity in this health-care mess. As television's Bill Maher opines at the end of the film, "We have to look in the mirror. We're the ones who didn't want national health care. We're the ones who didn't want to have our taxes raised." I can't remember a movie that made such a direct pitch to its viewers to change their own way of thinking and forced us to acknowledge that maybe we're to blame. It's not a subtle message (something that's bothered most critics), but I found it refreshing.   

J. Robert Parks 2/25/2002