Near Death

A sprawling 6 hour documentary on the ethical issues that doctors and family members of palliative care patients face when it comes down to the time of pulling the plug, so to say. The daunting length of the movie is a testament to the daunting passage of life to death, in that it you spend so much time connecting with the doctors, patients and family members that the tone of the movie transcends from frightening to strikingly terrifying. While Dying at Grace, which may be my favourite movie of all time, focuses more on the awe of dying, Near Death focuses on the struggle to save and rehabilitate, and this notion does not let up for the entire runtime. Near Death is an exhausting experience, and my heart goes out to the families who volunteered to have their last moments filmed for such an extraordinary film.

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.

I've had some of my favourite people die the last year or two, and spent a fair bit of time skulking in hospitals where dozens of patients all lie in sight of each other, measuring who's the closest to dropping off, sometimes having to remain for several hours in the same room as a dead person with whom they'd previously spoken on many occasions. The curtain isn't even always closed on them and the body remains in plain sight. Jung said something along the lines of the only way to lie comfortably on your deathbed is to constantly make plans for tomorrow as if you will one day rise again. I didn't see much of that going on there. Just sallow faces too scared to look down at their own cancer- consumed legs.

The main focus over these six hours is trying to work out just how far you should go to stave off an inevitable death. If a relative wants, the medical staff will assemble a team of literally dozens of people on call wielding drips, interpreting machines measuring their vital signs, making incisions, shouting out assessments over each other. And very few of the relatives here wanted any of their loved ones to go gentle into that good night. They hold onto an invisible strand of hope as long as possible, and the doctors confer and confer about their own attitudes towards their patients. Continuously expending all this energy on keeping obvious write-offs alive, which would likely result in brain damage even if they did survive, which they won't, clearly gets to some of them, although most of them abide by the Hippocratic Oath to the point that doing everything they can to give dying patients a few extra hours comes automatically to them.

Wiseman's lens is different to that of other directors. It's hard to ascertain exactly how he does it, but he manages to show that behind every pulse in a temple, every slight arching of an eyebrow, timbre of a voice, hand gesture and body stance there's a thought and reasoning and these surface tics are data belying our underlying thought processes. His films are almost raw footage but they still manage to keep you captive because, though we sometimes forget it ourselves, every human has a complex that will never be untangled. Werner Herzog might say Wiseman's verité documentaries only capture "the truth of accountants", but that seems to be downplaying his subjects' ability to tell hundreds of stories in every frame simply by dint of existing. And dying.

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

It's quite depressing because people are constantly down in this movie energies presented as a real-life sing so why would anybody want to see people that I know these sick individuals with like this and yes it is interesting to see how the doctor's deal with these things like life and death for the rest it's not so interesting one of the lesser great documentaries of the wonderful documentary maker Frederick Wiseman.