Cinema: Right Spirit, Wrong Cause

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY? Directed by John Badham Screenplay by Brian Clark and Reginald Rose

The situation, the overall dramatic structure and even much of the dialogue are almost exactly the same. But the emotional effect of the screen version of Whose Life Is It Anyway? is quite the opposite of the play on which it is based. One left Brian Clark’s drama feeling that Ken Harrison, the promising sculptor whom an auto accident had turned into a quadriplegic, was tragically correct to insist, against all the established medical and legal verities, on being allowed to die. One leaves the movie feeling that he is tragically wrong in that determination.

The fact that the film seems to stand the play on its head is not the result of carelessness or ineptitude. In fact, the picture is well made and well acted. But the turnabout does illustrate how differences between two leading actors’ personalities and differences in the demands of two media can alter meanings.

Ken was originally played on the stage by Tom Conti, an actor of great vulnerability—not a victim, surely, but a less abrasive individual than the film’s Richard Dreyfuss, and someone who could more readily be imagined preferring death to a life of immobility and dependence. Dreyfuss, by contrast, seems to bustle while flat on his back, and it is almost impossible to believe that in the end he would not opt for life, however constricted it might be.

This is particularly true in the context Director Badham has created for him in the movie. Onstage the sculptor never moved from his bed, and his confinement powerfully reinforced the pathos of his condition. In an obvious attempt to make his movie move, Badham insists on getting Ken up and stirring in a wheelchair at every logical opportunity. But this continual scooting about in hospital corridors undercuts Ken’s arguments for being allowed to die, for it illustrates how much he could participate in life with a little help from his friends. One can never entirely reject his arguments, but at the same time one gains sympathy with John Cassavetes as his doctor. He becomes Ken’s chief opponent in the long life and death confrontation that climaxes in a judicial hearing where the decision on the patient’s fate is rendered.

Cassavetes is at his saturnine best in this role, and Christine Lahti is fine as a more sympathetic M.D. Two other supporting performances, both offcast, are emblematic of the care with which Whose Life has been made. One is by Bob Balaban as Ken’s attorney. This is the third time this year that Balaban has played a lawyer (Prince of the City and Absence of Malice are the others), but the slick prosecutor of his earlier outings has here given way to a stammering humanism. The other is by Ken McMillan, the vulgarian of True Confessions and Ragtime, here playing a civilized judge agonizing over the rights and wrongs of Ken’s plea for radical redress of a radical grievance. The integrity of their presences compensates for gaffes like a flashback that needlessly proves Ken had an erotic as well as an artistic life.

Ordinarily one tends to suspect movies that veer too radically from the intent of their original sources. But Whose Life remains true to the highest purpose of the play: to set forth with honesty, passion and wit the arguments for and against euthanasia. That one so intensely wants the Dreyfuss character to change his mind is a tribute to the actor’s unquenchable vitality, and for many it may make the film more poignant. Who can doubt that it is more touching—and discomfiting—to see a man commit a good and valuable spirit to a wrong cause than to a right one? —By Richard Schickel