The Doctor movie review & film summary (1991)
The role is played in a detailed, observant way by William Hurt, who is able to make this egocentric surgeon into a convincing human being. In the wrong hands, this material could have been simply a cautionary tale, but Hurt and his director, Randa Haines, who also collaborated on “Children of a Lesser God,” make it into the story of a specific, flawed, fascinating human being.
As the movie opens, Hurt plays rock 'n' roll into his operating theater while literally holding the hearts of his patients in his hands. He leads a comfortable life in Marin County, Calif., with his wife (Christine Lahti) and two sons, but is not very close to his family. (In one revealing scene, he's standing in the living room when a son races in. “Say hello to your father,” Lahti says, and the kid automatically picks up the phone.) In his lectures to the interns at the hospital, Hurt warns that personal feelings have nothing to do with the science of medicine. Then he discovers otherwise.
His problem starts as a small, nagging cough. He ignores it until one day he coughs up blood. He goes to an eye, ear, nose and throat expert (played with cold precision by Wendy Crewson), and discovers that there is a tumor in his throat. It is malignant. He needs radiation therapy. If it doesn't work, he may need surgery. In that case, it's impossible to predict how his vocal cords will respond. He could lose the power of speech.
This is devastating news, which he receives with disbelief. How could a master of medicine like himself become its victim? As his treatment progresses, he doesn't like how his own hospital treats him, as he wastes time in waiting rooms, tangles with the bureaucracy and is repelled by Crewson's frigid bedside manner. For the first time, he grows close to a patient, June (Elizabeth Perkins), who has a brain tumor. They meet daily while they're having their treatments.
The broad outlines of the story progress more or less as expected. Threatened with his own mortality, he turns to June not for romantic reasons but as a fellow traveler in the same path. Their scenes together are handled with quiet tact and gentleness. Although his wife desperately tries to break through to him, she can't reach him (“I've spent so much time pushing her away, I don't know how to let her get close,” he confesses). He continues to work at his own practice and finds that for the first time he actually, personally, cares about his patients.
