TV REVIEW : ‘Extraordinary People’ Glosses Grim Message

The message delivered by John Zaritsky’s documentary “Extraordinary People” (tonight at 9 on Channels 28 and 15, 10 p.m. on Channel 50) is decidedly mixed. By choosing to focus on the resilient abilities of three male Canadian victims of the deformity-causing drug thalidomide, it tends to emphasize--even romanticize--the indomitable human spirit, and pushes the meaning of the thalidomide tragedy to the background.

Indeed, this mixed view is expressed by “thalidomide child” Alvin Law, who comments that it’s no use blaming anyone for what happened, and is then seen organizing with other Canadian thalidomide victims to pressure their government for compensation overdue by at least 20 years.

Thalidomide was a drug thought to suppress morning sickness in pregnant women, but caused horrible deformities in babies, if they lived to birth. More than 8,000 known victims were born between 1959 and 1962 in several countries outside the United States (where it was never approved, due to the resistence of Dr. Frances O. Kelsey of the Food and Drug Administration).

That does not mean that the United States was spared. More than two million tablets were distributed free, and given to 20,000 patients. Between 10 and 16 known thalidomide babies--perhaps more--were born in the United States. These facts were documented by British journalists but appear nowhere in Zaritsky’s film. The film’s rather bald assumption that the thalidomide story is well-known, stated here by host Judy Woodruff, results in gliding over some of the most crucial and obscure dimensions of the story.

It is certainly remarkable when the camera trains on the armless Law as he plays a very mean set of jazz drums with his feet, or when it shows how thalidomide children, naturally used to the sensations in their flipper-like feet or arms, often successfully resisted being fitted with artificial limbs. Law, like the film’s other subjects, Randy Warren and Paul Murphy, exhibit a humbling sense of honesty, self-esteem and altruism.

But the outrageous thalidomide legacy is more than the gallery of portraits in strength that Zaritsky presents. It is the result of governments neglecting to watchdog profit-hungry pharmaceutical companies, and a stern warning that it could happen again.