Near Death

I planned in late spring that I was going to devote part of the first week of September to watching Frederick Wiseman's Near Death, a six-hour documentary epic about family members responding to the final moments of a loved ones' life while hooked up to machinery in crowded hospitals, as well as a detailed account of the work put in by hospital staff and personnel. Little did I know, at the end of August, I would witness my own display of "near death."

My grandmother was admitted to the hospital after suffering a massive stroke and became so uncontrollable, in a tizzy of psychotic rage, she had to be detained to the bed and given dosages of a sleep drug. Turns out, my grandmother turned unconscious and, while she was able to breath on her own, she didn't seem to have much control over her movements. She couldn't speak, and all we could do as her family was stand by her and witness what could very well be her last moments. I spent hours in a hospital, alongside my unbelievably distraught grandfather, my restless, sleepless aunt, my own stressed father, who was left to make the decisions on what to do with my grandmother, my devastated cousins, my nurse mother, who'd come to the rescue of breaking down difficult information, and additional family members express grief and devastation to such a fit of heartbreak.

I'd like to say I'm digressing from the actual film at hand, but I believe Wiseman wants us to somewhat reflect on how we'd respond in this particular quandary, as well as try and relate an experience we've had where it was like staring death or "near death" in the face. Wiseman takes us inside Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, specifically in the intensive care unit, where dozens of competent and qualified medical personnel work to diagnose, treat, and console patients and their family members. These patients are admitted in the particular unit for the obvious concern - they need intense, uncompromising care, for these could, fearfully, be their last moments alive. Some have cancer, some have heart issues, some have poor lungs, and some are just coming to terms with their age. Whatever the case may be, this is a difficult time, and the news usually brought forth is negative or faintly positive.

Wiseman unsurprisingly doesn't examine medical debates such as universal healthcare, or even really dig deep into the concept of the afterlife, heaven vs. hell, and so forth. There's no place for that kind of debate at this moment in time. Wiseman wants to focus on the immediate present: what we can see, what we can hear, what we can observe, monitor, and digest about a loved one and what can we do to assure their health is maintained and their current state comfortable? Wiseman, in addition, captures everything through a black and white lens, as bleak as possible, complimenting much of the information we hear from doctors and loved ones throughout the course of six hours.

While few scenes in Near Death aren't sad, one of the most soul-crushing is seeing a doctor telling an elderly man that his lungs are in such poor condition that, while they'd like to put him in intubation (a process using a machine to restore competent breathing before being slowly weened off a patient so he can breath on his own), the staff feels that doing so would only confine him to the machine and make him dependent on it. The man sits there, lying in bed, with a blank look on his face. There is no emotion in this scene other than the emotions shed by the viewers. One could view this as a simple slice of life: we're born, we live, we get older, we shutdown, and we die. Others will view this as a depressingly human state of affairs. I say it's an inevitable tragedy that still nonetheless strikes an emotional chord.

The final hour and a half is mostly dedicated to examining a man, who has been admitted for similar reasons in that he is beginning to lose strength in his organs, mainly his heart, liver, and kidneys, and that is making his vitals - blood pressure, blood sugar, heart-rate - all operate in a poorer state. We see his long-devoted, ostensibly long-suffering wife, sob in front of a careful and compassionate doctor by the name of Dr. Taylor, as he sits by her side, quick to answer, or respond, to her many questions and concerns and offer additional options. Dr. Taylor and the woman speak for sometimes twenty minutes at a given time, frequently through the final hour and a half of this documentary, and they are some of the most human dialogs I've ever seen exchanged on film.

This is one of the many scenes that shows the true compassion and skill of the medical personnel all across America. These men and women, some old, some fresh out of medical school, some with the title of a 'doctor,' others playing assistant to the man/woman with the title, but their daily activities range from changing fluids, observing vitals, writing reports, or scratching backs of patients not equipped with the strength or energy to do it themselves. Not to mention, these doctors engage in some of the hardest conversations imaginable, arguably some of the hardest and rawest ever committed to film. Their compassion and soul shouldn't go unnoticed, albeit the incredible amount of information existing in this film.

Near Death is, admittedly, exhaustive and sometimes tedious, as expected with almost every film spanning one-forth of a day. Because of this, it is best digested over the course of two, or in my case three days, for emotions to be digested and to prevent information overload of any kind. Furthermore, it should be stated that Wiseman, as repetitive as it is getting to say, has made another masterpiece of documentary filmmaking.

This was an excellent breakdown of the complex relationships between hospital staff, patients, and their families and how their mannerisms change around and away from each other. One could call the film a tragedy, but as we gradually realize over the course of its nearly six-hour runtime, the tragedy at the heart of their jobs is just a regular part of everyday work.

I was mildly saddened by the fates and situations of a couple patients shown early on, but like the doctors, I realized the survival rate of the patients was low and adjusted myself to that fact. Thus making every minute of its runtime necessary. One doctor, for instance, explained how her first week was the hardest since none of her patients were pulling through but she quickly realized most of what she can do is simply delay the inevitable and minimize their pain as much as possible, as opposed to save them. Other doctors occasionally vent their frustrations about the patients and joke about their situations behind their back, but a lot of this could very well be a coping mechanism they use to deal with the stress of their jobs. Because whenever the doctors are around the families, they always display an utmost sense of honesty and respect. They need to walk a fine balancing act with being honest about the dire situation at hand and the odds of the patients pulling through, while remaining respectful to the agency of the patient and the family in being the ultimate deciding factor of what medical procedures they're comfortable undergoing, being careful not to offend in the process.

The patients' situations being unpredictable and subject to change at any given moment is on full display throughout but perhaps most achingly exemplified through an elderly female patient who's clearly not all there given her constant uncertainty and variable responses to the doctors' questions on how to proceed. With her mental decline influencing her contradictory responses and constant requests to keep "thinking about it", one can feel each agonizing minute of her time slowly running out. Even with the other patients, the doctors consistently specify that any procedure they do comes with potential consequences and the patient will need to be constantly monitored throughout them every step of the way. The unpredictability of the future makes the present situation of the patients so finite. There's no way for them to go but forward.

Like the other documentaries I've seen from Wiseman so far, he doesn't need to spell out the themes of his work or include any voiceovers/exposition which outline them. The fly on the wall look at his subjects speaks for itself and says all that's needed. That said, I think I prefer Titicut Follies.

It's good fly-on-the-wall documentary filmmaking, but I do wonder why it's so long. I don't think many of the scenes themselves should've been shorter- maybe just that there were too many scenes for one whole film. I wish it had been divided into parts so it wasn't just one big film that (likely) needs to be watched as a whole. Or at least it seems intended to be watched as a whole- I can't find any info regarding it being split into parts, or originally being a miniseries or anything.

There's some truly eye-opening stuff, and information that every human being would benefit from learning or experiencing. For that, there are essential scenes which usually would warrant a higher score than 3.5/5. But it's all thrown into one mammoth six-hour film that 99.99% of people would never touch with a 358-foot-long pole, even if most of them would get something out of this. And even those who do build up the courage to watch it may be a tad too exhausted by its end. Again, it's supposed to be emotionally exhausting and draining, I'm sure, but maybe not in this way or to this extent.

A very long documentary, but you can't stop watching it even after the 4th hour. the footage was taken in an intensive unit care of a Boston hospital and it is simply about the world in there, a world made of medical doctors and nurses, near to death patients and their desperate relatives. A small world that lives constantly on the verge of a crucial boundary, the one between life and death, a world that is not meant to be inhabited for too long and in which everybody tries to find a self protective routine. The desperate relatives with their cries and tries of find an escape in the medical daily reports leading to an impossible recovery of their beloved ones. The hopeless and impotent patients with their silent pain and their belonging already to another world. The compassionate but always rational doctors that gained a sort of self powering attitude from living between life and death and are in fact just able to endless discussions. Wiseman is able to use these reality cuts and to make a novel out of them, still portraying the reality and in a beautifully 'dirty' black and white. Or better, in grey, this is how death is: and this is what this film is about, death and the poor means that every men and women of every status and education have to deal with it.

Grueling in both subject matter and running time, _Near Death_ nonetheless poses questions that most of us will have to answer, at some point in our lives, for either ourselves or a loved one. Do what extent should measures be taken to preserve a life that might be full of pain and sustained by a machine? Should the goal for terminally ill patients with little hope of recovery be life support, or comfort? At what point do we give up hope of recovery? While expressing ample skepticism about the function of much of our society's expensive, intrusive life-support technology, _Near Death_ also gives us little glimmers of hope - if only regarding the degree to which we can support each other in coming to terms with death, pain, and degeneration. The warmth and patience of one Dr. Taylor in this film is especially heartening, and very istructive in understanding, in human terms, the medical and philosophical issues at play. An unforgettable viewing experience