I hope you'll allow me a little shameless spousal promotion...
My wife Miri Navasky and her longtime collaborator Karen O'Connorhave made what's perhaps their best film, and that's saying something. (Their 2007 film The Undertaking won an Emmy, and their 2006 film The New Asylums won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Award for Journalism.)
Their new film, Facing Death, is about end-of-life decisions. As many of us know firsthand (and most of us will eventually know firsthand), these choices can be devastatingly difficult, and medicine's ever-growing capacity to keep people alive is only making them more so. In Facing Death, you'll see severely ill people, their families, and their doctors making these decisions, often agonizing over them.
It's not an easy film to watch, but you'll be enriched and stimulated if you do.
I think Miri and Karen do an amazing job of exploring this issue it all its complexity, and the New York Times, which reviews it this morning, agrees:
[T]he film, produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, who paid such elegant tribute to the grim subject of mortuary work in “The Undertaking,” ambitiously explores the complex questions that arise about extending life.
They shot the film at Mt. Sinai hospital, which gave them extraordinary access. As did the patients and their families. It's an intimate film. You'll see people in extremely vulnerable moments, but thanks to the sensitivity of the filmmakers, you never feel as though you're invading. This is common to all their films: people are shown in extreme circumstances, when they're emotionally raw, stripped bare, but Miri and Karen respect their dignity. More than that, they capture it and celebrate it.
But what's perhaps most striking in Facing Death are the interviews with the doctors. I think you'll be surprised by their honesty (and humanness).
It was simpler a few decades ago: people got sick and died. Not so now. Advances in medicine hold the promise of more time but also make it more likely that we'll end up stuck on a machine, incapacitated, with our families left to carry out our wishes, if they know what they are. (Fill out an advance directive, people!) As Dr. Judith Nelson says in the film, "Nobody wants to die. And at the same time, nobody wants to die badly." These two needs aren't easily reconciled.
The film focuses on people, but political questions hang over it, most notably: Can the country afford to pay for unlimited medical procedures on people in the last weeks and months of their lives? The film offers no answers, although on a personal note, it did change my thinking somewhat. I'd underestimated the power of the will to live and the corresponding difficulty of declining treatment that offers a chance, however small, to live longer. Miri and Karen speak to Jerome Groopman, the well-known author and doctor at Harvard Med School, who says that patients with severe illnesses:
will go with you to the edge, even for that small hope, that small chance that they'll beat the odds and they'll be the one who will emerge. Often they're not. But sometimes they are.
I hope you watch. On PBS tonight. Check your local listings, as they say. Here's a little taste:
UDPATED: I forgot to link the film's website, where you can watch it in its entirety. The reviews are coming in, and so far they're uniformly positive. Here's syndicated critic Kevin McDonough:
A thoughtful, painful and gripping hour of television, "Facing Death" is not for everyone but it does offer a thoughtful, open-minded and dignified discussion of an important topic that is all too often reduced to rancorous rhetoric or glib sound bites.