News

Extraordinary Measures

• Directed by Tom Vaughan
• Written by Robert Nelson Jacobs
• Starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser
• Classification: PG
• Two Stars

The story of a brave dad fighting for his sick children's lives, Extraordinary Measures is a CBS Film. At first glance, it feels like one of those inspirational weepies TV used to churn out, with a seasoned actress like Elizabeth Montgomery playing the flinty heroine.

The plot is ladled out with a big spoon. A girl is shown bowling from a wheelchair. Kids gather around, cheering. Cut to Megan blowing out candles on her birthday cake. She's eight. Next, her exhausted dad (Brendan Fraser) is at home, hunched over medical files. The camera pans down a report, which explains the wheelchair: Pompe is a fatal children's disease. Although some kids “live as long as nine years.”

According to TV ratings, lots of people live for this kind of stuff. Others are incapable of accessing “good cry” entertainment and wish that someone, Ralph Nader maybe, would file a class-action suit prohibiting Hollywood from producing movies about children and athletes with incurable diseases.

The latter, it turns out, needn't fear Extraordinary Measures, a film that keeps suffering children mostly off screen.

Based on a true story, the movie is more interested in the father's dealings with another child, a big baby of a scientist played by Harrison Ford. Dr. Robert Stonehill is one of those idiot savants who can solve the world's great riddles, but is incapable of small talk. Stonehill doesn't have an indoor voice. He yells at everyone who doesn't understand him. A group that pretty well includes the rest of the world.

Stonehill is developing a cure for Pompe, but needs funding. Fraser's character, John Crowley, quits his job to help.

Extraordinary Measures is best when Fraser is on screen. Ian McKellen, who starred with Fraser in Gods and Monsters, called him the most natural actor he'd worked with, marvelling at Fraser's ability to disappear into roles.

Here, he is frighteningly elastic. Crowley practises meticulous calm withstanding Stonehill in one scene; handles a biotech bigwig with bland corporate speak the next; then clowns easily with children. In every situation, the Harvard MBA pretends control, acting as if everything is all right. It isn't, and Crowley sometimes falls silent in meetings and takes off on long car rides by himself.

Fraser hasn't had much to do since God and Monsters. Mostly, he's been the adult supervision in children’s adventure flicks. In Extraordinary Measures he is transformed. He even looks different – heavier, as if weighed down with worry and hospital cafeteria food. And he gives the performance of his career, creating an eloquent portrait of a modern professional lost at sea.

If only the film had taken as much care with Dr. Stonehill. Ford is the same cranky pants he's always been – Indiana Jones in a lab coat. In his defence, there is no scene into his role. Stonehill is just another movie mad scientist.

A better filmmaker than Tom Vaughan (What Happens in Vegas) might have also been more curious about the multibillion-dollar biotech world. The book upon which the film is based is titled: The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million – and Bucked the Medical Establishment – in a Quest to Save His Children.

There isn't a lot of bucking going on here. The medical establishment is portrayed as responsible financiers. Philanthropists almost.

Extraordinary Measures is often an ordinary movie. It does, however, contain one extraordinary achievement. Hopefully, Brendan Fraser's measured performance will liberate him from the babysitting roles that have been his lot in Hollywood.

Special to The Globe and Mail