(2009) "Self-determination is a basic human right." Fear of dying can make some people incredibly stupid or arrogantly controlling about the end of existence, when no quality of life options remain for others. Ending one's life is "something a person should be in control of" whenever practical as it is in some European countries.

Combining superb acting with actual video footage of terminal patients pleading for a cessation to their suffering, director Barry Levinson's biopic of Dr Jack Kevorkian (Al Pacino, his voice effectively altered with aid from a dialogue coach) for HBO-TV is a portrayal (screenplay by Adam Mazer) of a courageous individual, the first American doctor to advocate physician-assisted suicide, willing to sacrifice himself for the right of others to die with dignity, based in part on Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie's book, Between the Dying and the Dead. "It's just common sense."

In Oak Hill, Michigan, Dr Kevorkian, a charmless, unemployed pathologist, becomes preoccupied with the wasting final stage of people dying in pain, kept alive against their wishes, while their organs go to waste. Aghast at the look of agony on the faces of terminal patients in hospitals, reminding him of his own mother's death throes, he tells his sister Margo Janus (Brenda Vaccaro): "It's not living. It's not being alive."

When medicine can no longer cure, medicide he believes should be made available to those who desire euthanasia, for which purpose Jack creates his Mercitron machine with its a triple-chemical intravenous drip - a saline solution that activates thiopental (inducing a coma), followed by a lethal dose of potassium chloride to stop the heart - which the patient alone triggers.

His Armenian parents having escaped genocide, Kevorkian tells Newsweek's correspondent Jack Lessenberry that the method of starving unconscious patients in America is as unconscionable as what the Nazis did to those in the concentration camps. His face will also eventually appear on the cover of Time.

A victim of Alzheimer's disease, Janet Adkins ("I'm losing control of my brain"), with her husband's support, becomes Kevorkian's first volunteer to choose his method of avoiding a slow, debilitating death, or as Jack describes it, "the terror of being lost." When law-enforcement authorities respond to Mrs Adkins's dying inside a VW bus in a state park - after a last-minute change of plans when the president of the Hemlock Society, Janet Good (Susan Sarandon), backs out on her offer to use her home for the procedure - Jack provocatively says: "Let them come after me."

Even though they have to do their work stealthily in the back of a van during the middle of the night, Jack reminds his friend and assistant Neal Nicol (John Goodman) that they're not criminals. Arguing that the right to die by choice is a civil rights issue, attorney Geoffrey Fieger (Danny Huston) offers to defend Jack without fee: "I simply do not lose."

Jack takes to the air to espouse his viewpoint - on Bob Bender's radio program ("talking death with Dr Death") and Barbara Walters's TV show (explaining how because of a religious dogma patients were denied ether for surgery for three centuries and accusing doctors of being more interested in their portfolios than their patients ) - while state prosecutors, Dick Thompson (Cotter Smith), admittedly a religious person concerned about "cost-containment strategies" resulting from legalization of euthanasia, and David Gorcyca (David Wilson Barnes), file an indictment for homicide after a double assisted suicide (Sherry Miller and Marjorie Wantz) occurs.

Though the case is dismissed by a judge, Jack loses his medical license without which he is forbidden from dispensing medication; he switches to using a toxic gas. Following a falling out between Margo and Jack, Neal takes over responsibilities of videotaping the interviews with applicants (many of those requesting his service, who aren't terminally ill, are turned down) preceding suicide.

Confronted by protesters ("Life is God's choice") accusing his assisting with suicide as being worse than abortion, Jack retorts that if it's good enough for the aristoi, then it should be good enough for the hoi polloi. "Have you no religion?" demands another: "Have you no God?" "Oh, I do, lady," answers Jack: "I have a religion. His name is Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach. And at least my god isn't an invented one."

In addition to being a physician, Jack paints unsettling images on canvases, writes verse ("Because it's my name. Because I cannot have another in my life. Because I'm not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang. How may I live without my name? I've given you my soul. Leave me my name"), and plays the flute. Having never married (Janet Good asks him: "Could you have loved?"), he's also frugal and cold-blooded.

With Gov John Engler's ban on assisted suicide (four-year prison sentence), Jack decides to challenge the new law with patient number 16, Thomas Hyde, 30 years old and suffering from ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. When he's found guilty and incarcerated, Jack mocks the judge's sentencing by vowing to go on a hunger strike: "You are assisting in my suicide." After nineteen days of his refusal to eat (the makeup is extraordinarily realistic), his bond is reduced from $50,000 to $100 before Fieger again wins an appeal.

After the Margo Janus Mercy Clinic (in memory of his sister) is forced to close, determined to take his argument to the US Supreme Court to provoke a national debate - "The lingering of death, what a business. Keep death alive. Hospitals don't make money otherwise. Drug companies either" - pressured by his own mortality ("running out of time") and concern that public sympathy may be turning aside ("You need more people in your corner," says Janet) with no further harassment after 130 patients, Jack crosses "into uncharted territory" with active euthanasia, directly administering to Thomas Youk, a 50-year-old patient with ALS, a lethal injection.

Through Lessenberry, Jack sends a copy of the videotaped procedure to Mike Wallace of CBS's 60 Minutes. "I don't care what happens to me," insists Jack to Fieger, "and I'm not afraid because I'm right."

In a fifth trial, prosecutors Thompson and Gorcyca drop the charge of assisted suicide (to eliminate the defense's right to call on sympathetic witnesses) to focus on first-degree murder and delivery of a controlled substance. Choosing to represent himself in court (the judge frequently chides him for not having a proper legal defense; Fieger in his run for governor had disavowed a person's right to euthanasia), Jack claims he provides a medical service to incurably suffering patients, rejecting the prosecution's appellation of "mercy killing." Outraged at Gorcyca's analogy to the Nazis, Jack screams: "How dare you compare euthanasia with genocide!" His efforts to address the suffering of the dying as his sole intention are repeatedly met by Judge Cooper's rulings of "not relevant."

Sentencing Kevorkian to prison for 10 to 25 years, Judge Cooper says to him: "You may not break the law or take the law into your own hands…. No one is above the law."

Eight years later in 2007, Jack Kevorkian at 79 was released from jail. Euthanasia (in which a physician or another third party administers the medication) is still illegal in all states of the United States, though physician aid-in-dying (PAD, in which the patient, after deciding whether and when, may self-administer the medication) is permitted in Washington, Oregon, and Montana.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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