MOVIE REVIEW : VA Indictment Deserves a Better Film

The righteous outrage at the heart of “Article 99” (selected theaters) is so justified that it tends to dwarf the film itself. The current appalling nationwide situation in which veterans are denied proper medical treatment through bureaucratic obstructionism is a great subject, and it deserves a great movie.

“Article 99” (rated R for language) isn’t bad; it captures some of the baroque looniness in a VA hospital where doctors, in order to properly treat their patients, must resort to midnight hijacks of supplies for unauthorized operations. But it’s too melodramatically contrived, with too many “MASH”-like confabs. We keep wanting to break through the worked-up situations, the obligatory romances, the clowning around, and get to the meat of the matter. The subject is so powerful that the movie doesn’t need all this standard-issue ruckus to affect audiences.

The Article 99 in the title is a fictional but reality-based regulation where veterans are denied full medical benefits if they can’t prove their ailments were directly related to military service. The doctors at the Kansas City VA hospital where the film takes place are a cynical, freewheeling bunch, but they’re good doctors. Somewhat like the soldiers they treat, these physicians are dealing with the consequences of their own private war; their enemies are the bureaucrats running the hospital, the ones who are more concerned with inventory than with patients.

Ray Liotta’s Dr. Sturgess is the most freewheeling and gifted of the medics. With his cohorts--played by Forest Whitaker, John C. McGinley, Lea Thompson--he crashes through red-tape by every subterfuge imaginable. He treats a cardiac patient who is only authorized for prostate surgery; he and his team routinely “turf” patients from one hospital zone to another in order to prevent their expulsion. Sturgess even knows to talk down a psychotically stressed vet who crashes his truck through the hospital’s front doors and then starts shooting up the place.

Kiefer Sutherland’s Dr. Peter Morgan is supposed to be the callow intern who joins up with the team as a way station to a cushy practice in Beverly Hills. The other doctors, and many of the nurses, treat him with disdain, although the vehemence of their anger doesn’t seems justified. Morgan, in his way, is doing the best he can, but we recognize the plot wheels turning; he’s supposed to eventually recognize the value of “good” medicine and renounce his ultra-lucrative prospects. And, of course, by doing so, he attracts the love of a good woman.

The subplots in this film all seem tacked on for an easy emotional effect. There’s Morgan’s emotional bonding with a dying WWII veteran (Eli Wallach); a romance between Sturgess and an embittered staff psychiatrist (Kathy Baker). The hospital’s chief bureaucrat, a hardboiled cur played by John Mahoney, is right up there with Lionel Barrymore in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Mahoney is an expert at this sort of thing but, in a way, his expertness is a key to the film’s problems. Having set up a horrendous, true-to-life situation, the director Howard Deutch and his screenwriter Ron Cutler, don’t quite give the horror its due. The impression you get is that if only a guy like Mahoney’s Dr. Dreyfoos wasn’t running the hospital, these outrages wouldn’t exist. The movie needs more of an Oliver Stone-like punch: a sense that the horrors we are witnessing are more wide-ranging and conspiratorial.

The actors, though, are a lively bunch. They keep things moving. As crusading physicians, they’re a believable team; they jangle together in ways that point up the long, sleepless stretches they’ve spent together. It’s unfortunate that Forest Whitaker doesn’t have more to do, but Liotta makes the most of his ample screen time. He’s avid without being tiresome. Sutherland doesn’t really match his intensity, but that may not be his fault. The role is too bumpkinish. The late Julie Bovasso, in a small role as a tough-as-nails nurse, goes out in glory.

The filmmakers involved in “Article 99” have been true to their outrage, but they don’t orchestrate it in ways that might really resonate for audiences. The feeling in Hollywood is that you can’t dramatize a serious subject without injecting it with broad-based, mass-audience “entertainment values,” which usually turn out to be the kind of cornball stuff that goes down easy on television. But this approach probably underestimates both the filmmakers and the audience.

‘Article 99’

Ray Liotta: Dr. Richard Sturgess

Kiefer Sutherland: Dr. Peter Morgan

John Mahoney: Dr. Henry Dreyfoos

An Orion release of a Gruskoff/Levy Company production. Director Howard Deutch. Producers Michael Gruskoff and Michael I. Levy. Screenplay by Ron Cutler. Cinematographer Richard Bowen. Editor Richard Halsey. Costumes Rudy Dillon. Music Danny Elfman. Production design Virginia Randolph. Art director Marc Fisichella. Set decorator Sarah Stone. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).