When I hear a movie title like “The Good Doctor” (2011,
directed by Lance Daly), I’m reminded on an anagram on names, “Le beau arbitrageur,
la belle arbitrageuse” back in the 1980s after reading a newspaper article on
arbitrage during the 1980s hostile takeover craze on Wall Street. That business venture affected the hospital
world in the US, too, although I guess I’m venturing astray from the subject of
this little horror film. True, hospital
staff is nervous. It has to follow
procedure and write-up incident reports.
Young doctors have egos, but they may not always know when they have
crossed the line.
Martin Blake (Orlando Bloom) is a young, smart-talking
resident whose British accent is rather obvious in the film, at some small
hospital on the California coast. He has
a spartan apartment on the beach (is that in Venice?) He’s a little clumsy socially. He starts treating a young woman (Riley
Keough; the film says she is 18) for a kidney infection and becomes attached to
her. So he starts messing with her medications to keep her coming back. The movie does a good job of presenting the
issue of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Other staff is a little suspicious, and the fatherly Dr.
Waylans (Rob Morrow) starts counseling him, getting him to introspect on
whether he really wants a career on medicine.
And an orderly (Gary Cervantes) notices even more, and starts to
blackmail him.
Here the film takes on a Perry Mason tack – the orderly
winds up murdered by cyanide. But you
know who did it. You find yourself
liking the good doctor enough to hope he gets away with his mistakes and moves
on. The movie clumsily gives the viewer a choice of endings.
The official site is here. The tagline is “Do no harm”.
The film, from Magnolia Pictures, can be rented for $2.99
legally on YouTube. I watched it on
Netflix subscription.
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