Hmm...Movie Review: You Don't Know Jack

Oh, do I ever have a free movie with a health angle for you this evening!

Recently it was selling kidneys. Tonight, assisted suicide. The latest theme in my free movies: controversial medical ethics questions!

Now this movie, You Don't Know Jack, is a dramatization of the story of Jack Kevorkian, famous worldwide as Dr. Death back in the 1990s when he helped over 100 people end their lives.

It was a bit dark--and I don't mean the subject matter, I just mean the images. It was sort of pseudo-documentary style, so it all looked like something someone might have shot on a home video camera and shown on public access TV. I think this did add to the feeling of realism and humanity in the stories, but there were moments when I just thought "come on, I vaguely remember the '90s and they weren't that grim! There was color!"

That aside, it seemed like a fair retelling of Dr. Kevorkian's quest to make physician-assisted suicide legal and widely available (at least as far as I could tell, not having any particular insight into it).

It presents his work sympathetically, and doesn't give much time to arguments against assisted suicide, so don't expect a carefully evenhanded debate picture. It basically begins as he prepares to assist with a suicide for the first time, and continues through his final trial, in which he was convicted of second degree murder and sent to prison. As you may recall, he just got out in 2007.

Al Pacino does a very nice job as Dr. Kevorkian. As my spouse commented afterwards, after piles of scenery-chewing movies, "you forget that he can actually act."

It was an interesting movie, and raises plenty of those interesting and disturbing questions.

Do competent adults have the right to decide when their lives end? Do we, to return to the kidney-selling question, own our own bodies and get to decide what happens to them? Does your body, your life, belong to you?

Or is it just too dangerous to have physicians offering this 'out' to people? Will it put pressure on people who may not actually want to end their lives but are made to feel that they're a 'burden' to others?

As with the sale of kidneys, how likely are people to make this choice in constrained circumstances, because of financial fears, rather than because it's something they really want?

If this is a problem, is allowing assisted suicide just a hideous cop-out, distracting us from the fact that some people with intolerable health issues might not find life that bad if they only had the right care and support? Should we be worrying about providing this care and support, instead of arguing over whether or not people should be able to get help with killing themselves?

I can't wait to see what tough questions the next free movie covers.

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