Flash Outshines Any Substance

Showtime tilts heavily toward docudrama this weekend when airing two original movies that don’t even do justice to the swanky press kits sent out to promote them.

Arriving tonight is “Last Call,” yet another grim postmortem of F. Scott Fitzgerald, this one with Jeremy Irons a bad fit as the noted author in a story drawn from Frances Kroll Ring’s memoir, “Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Dr. Linda Peeno knows about fighting currents, and she has emotional scars to prove it. That, at least, surfaces in Sunday night’s “Damaged Care,” an account of her agonizing evolution from guilt-ridden managed-care functionary to outspoken critic of the entire industry. Even Laura Dern, as Peeno, can’t rescue this film.

“Last Call” opens in 1939 with 23-year-old Frances (Neve Campbell) coming aboard as secretary to Fitzgerald, celebrated author of “The Great Gatsby” and other novels. He’s now on the skids in Hollywood, where his gin bottles far outnumber his lines of prose and where his mad wife, Zelda (Sissy Spacek), torments him in boozy delusions as much as she did when they were together.

But there’s hope. A whiff of artistry is in the air as Frances, an aspiring writer, is hired to take dictation and type the book Fitzgerald is starting about a young movie mogul named Monroe Stahr.

He won’t complete “The Last Tycoon.” He’ll die at age 44 on Dec. 21, 1940, the day after writing the first episode of Chapter 6.

Few among U.S. literati are as fascinating and complex as Fitzgerald, who was just 23 when his authorship of “This Side of Paradise” made him famous and rich. Yet “Last Call” is as aimless as the moneyed class he so often depicted, and Irons’ Fitzgerald as bogus as Jay Gatsby while padding around in his bathrobe and yielding to spurts of inspiration between those fantasies with Zelda, dreamed up by director-writer Henry Bromell.

Irons is a good actor but offers here another of the near-generic tortured souls he has played so often. There is no reservoir of strength beneath the sadness, no hint of the writer who, while battling his usual demons, was able to turn his aborted last novel into something mature and first-rate as far as it went. Beyond that, the British Irons is wrong physically for the role and slips occasionally into a dialect that is faintly Southern (Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minn.).

Campbell’s Frances provides welcome freshness from the moment she gets her first look at Fitzgerald, gasp-y and disoriented in bed with fat pouches under his red eyes. But her own eyes are too wide, and she mostly reminds you of a young Judy Garland singing “You Made Me Love You” to a photo of Clark Gable.

After one of his drinking binges, Fitzgerald awakens energized and ready to write, ordering Frances to “get cracking,” a message equally applicable to this movie.

“Damaged Care,” meanwhile, has timing in its favor, arriving just as Kaiser Permanente is under fire in Northern California for rewarding call-center clerks who limited doctors’ appointments and spent the least time on the phone with patients. And, of course, health care remains an ongoing crisis in the U.S.

As directed by Harry Winer, however, “Damaged Care” is burdened by weak storytelling that undermines its strong indictment of at least some HMOs.

Ilene Chaiken’s script has Peeno becoming disillusioned after putting her medical degree to misuse as a claims evaluator with Humana Inc. in Louisville, where she finds patient care to be much less important than profit.

The company’s bottom line, it turns out, is the bottom line. “Let’s go out and improve our numbers,” the staff is urged.

Peeno keeps guiltily collecting her paycheck while doing a slow burn, using her “denied” stamp far more than “approved.” Then one day she has to decide whether to give thumbs up to a heart transplant. “Are there any alternatives?” her boss asks. “Death,” she replies. Peeno’s approval is overruled, and she soon quits out of principle, angering her physician husband (James LeGros).

Her second job in managed care, as director of medical reviews, ultimately turns out as frustrating when her decisions on behalf of patients are overridden by the company’s witch of a nursing manager (Michelle Clunie). Many sleepless nights later, her marriage seemingly in ruins, Peeno exchanges her HMO career for one as an advocate for patients’ rights and goes on to give congressional testimony and testify in a lawsuit against Humana.

A little subtlety and nuance would work wonders for this story’s credibility.

Peeno’s heroism aside, nearly all the characters opposing her are one-dimensionally nasty. They’re so easily identifiable as heartless and coldblooded in all ways that you half expect them to push little old ladies in front of traffic to avoid paying for their medical care. As if evil were always as instantly obvious.

The usually accomplished Dern, who has a producing credit here, is nearly as one-note herself, scrunching up her face repeatedly to show how upset Peeno is. All right already, the point is made.

But stamp the movie “denied.”

*

“Last Call” premieres tonight at 8 on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14-VLD (may be unsuitable for children under 14, with advisories for violence, coarse language and suggestive dialogue).