Calculating rhythm; "John Q." and "Crossroads."(two films)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 04-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Melodrama has often served as a vehicle for social protest in American movies, but "John Q.," which attacks the inequality of health care in this country, falls below even minimal standards of dramatic decency. "John Q." is a trashy, opportunistic piece of pop demagoguery. It justifies hostage-taking, and lays out its characters in opposing stereotypes for easy audience identification. It hectors us, shames us, and plucks our heartstrings with a ham fist (if you think that's physically impossible, wait until you see the end of the movie, which could reduce Slobodan Milosevic to tears). And yet, as awful as "John Q." is, the picture does touch a nerve. The audience is alive to it: on opening day in a Times Square multiplex, people were shouting back at the screen, and a quarrel broke out in the theatre between men with different views of the movie. There's a lot of pent-up anger about the way the health-care system works, and "John Q." plugs into that anger like a drill working the Alaskan subsoil. The movie appears to be turning into a hit, and the consequences could be interesting. Right-wing populist movies -- usually in the form of vigilante fantasies, like "Collateral Damage" -- open every year, but a left-wing populist movie has become a rarity. There was "Erin Brockovich,"...

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