Article 99

Article 99

“Article 99”, which hopes to be MASH in a veterans’ hospital, made me uncomfortable. Clearly the filmmakers have studied “MASH” (the movie) as well as such quip-a-minit TV shows as “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere,” and taken that formula and mixed it up with some social outrage. They’re trying to make a comedy with a heart, but it just doesn’t work.

The setting is a Veterans Administration hospital in Kansas City, where an overworked staff copes with an inadequate budget, outmoded facilities and a Neanderthal boss who’s interested only in his government career. The patients many of them decorated heroes are shuttled from one ward to another; the dedicated young doctors try to outsmart the bureaucracy while saving lives: If the government won’t pay for a heart bypass, they’ll schedule prostate surgery and do the heart bypass unofficially.

Everything is seen through the eyes of young Dr. Morgan (Kiefer Sutherland), who figures on interning at the hospital and then moving into a lucrative practice. Before he knows it he’s involved in late night raids on supply rooms by rebel leader Dr. Sturgess (Ray Liotta), who steals unauthorized items like Pacemakers for use elsewhere in unscheduled operations; Sturgess is in mortal combat with Dreyfoos (John Mahoney), the administrator who cares much less for human lives than for his budget; and so on.

Forrest Whitaker and Kathy Baker are among rebel doctors also featured in the cast.

This message isn’t new, but will send no echoes through Washington, where funds for VA hospitals have been trimmed to two aspirin tablets apiece. But then comes this year’s presidential election campaign, during which Democratic front-runner Bill Clinton makes headlines by promising that if elected he will join Sen. Jay Rockefeller in signing up for the VA plan.

Suddenly, you’ll feel like a real chump if you complain about waiting 11 hours to see an internist.

But that won’t happen, because we know from movies that there is always an empty wheelchair around when you need one; and that beautiful young nurses will drop everything to throw their arms around doctors who have saved lives. And so on.

Ron Cutler’s screenplay and Howard Deutch’s direction give us no reason at all to believe these people and this situation are real. Feature films don’t have to contain a laugh line every 60 seconds (and I am not even sure “Article 99” gets one every 60 minutes). Dialogue does not have to be in the false style of sitcoms, in which no one ever needs to think before talking. And scenes do not always have to intercut between parallel actions until we’re ready to scream with the irony of it all as when Liotta performs surgery while Mahoney gives orders at gunpoint in another section of the hospital.

The director has no instinct for what is true and moving here; he cuts between his stories like a man playing hopscotch, insulating himself against his material by making the connections all too clear. Give me anything but precision!

Take, for example, the story of the guy with the bad ticker. He is moved from room to room within a given ward, then from ward to ward within a floor, then hidden from administration on another floor, then forgotten by accident in the basement and stored overnight on a gurney in a corridor next door to Morgan’s office where he dies. At some point his case stops being depressing and starts being absurd; it would never occur anywhere except in precisely such a movie as “Article 99.”

Film reviewers frequently criticize movies that they believe are “like TV sitcoms.” I think it’s because we expect or want a little more effort and experimentation from films. To distinguish between a genuine movie and sitcom, juxtapose “Article 99” against Oliver Stone’s depiction of VA hospitals in “Born on the Fourth of July.”

The difference between Stone’s rage and the cheesy emotional beats of “Article 99” is so drastic that I can’t understand why someone who had seen the former would be bold enough to make the latter.

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