I was very apprehensive about viewing Geoffrey Smith’s latest feature-length documentary film, The English Surgeon. I think it was the picture on the movie’s poster - the grave, concerned face of the film’s neurosurgeon subject - that set me up to be a cynic. At first sight, Dr. Henry Marsh seems to satisfy all the clichés typical of the standard, run of the mill surgeon; the thick, black-rimmed glasses with wide circular lenses, the lines etched across the slopes of his cheeks, the big blue eyes set beneath the creases of his extra furrowed brow – all of these characteristics seem accentuated to cue the notion of the compassionate, all knowing medicine man in the minds of those unacquainted with just how inefficient and uncaring doctors of any kind can be.
Its producers tout The English Surgeon as a powerful, emotional analysis of one man’s struggle between “God-like surgical powers” and fallible, imperfect humanity. I, however, supposed that the film might actually be the manifestation of one man’s colossal ego sweeping through examination rooms and over operating tables, untroubled by how delicate patients or scrutinizing audience members might react. I have a history of hating doctors; naturally, I assumed I would not find myself swept up in sentiment after viewing this movie about a “benevolent” English surgeon submitting himself to “pro bono” neurosurgical work in the Ukraine. However, for the most part, I have become an unwavering fan of this film, its beautiful cinematography, its captivating characters, and its simultaneously hopeful yet solemn soul.
Fittingly, I attended a screening of this movie at the 2008 Silverdocs film festival, in a beautiful Silver Spring theater just a block away from the Discovery Channel’s headquarters. While Discovery Health Channel documentaries are quite fascinating indeed, The English Surgeon is much distinguished from its television, health-chronicling counterparts; the movie is so artfully shot, so perfectly scored, that it plays like a feature length film. The documentary’s premise goes something like this: On a trip to the Ukraine, English neurosurgeon Henry Marsh found few to no brain tumor treatment options available to the country’s neurosurgical patients. Amidst a landscape filled with incompetent, unethical medical personnel, Dr. Marsh discovered Dr. Igor Kurilets working furiously to help his patients in the KGB hospital where political prisoners had received brutal electroshock therapy treatments up until just a few years before. Igor dreams of opening his country’s first independent neurosurgical clinic; until then, Dr. Marsh agreed to be his mentor while saving as many Ukrainian patients as he can.
The bulk of the movie surrounds Marian, a young man, living in rural, Western Ukraine with an epilepsy-inducing brain tumor considered inoperable by his homeland’s doctors. When Dr. Marsh meets Marian, he is candid about the damage brain surgery might inflict on Marian’s mind. However, for Marsh and Marian, the risk of surgery shrinks in comparison to the consequences of such a deadly tumor. Preparations are made and suspense builds up to the most climactic, if not intense sequence of the film: a fifteen minute, graphically illustrated brain operation that requires Marian to remain awake the entire time. Surprisingly, these moments spent cutting through Marian’s skull and slicing through his brain tissue are worth much more than shock value; the patient is so endearing, so filled with faith, that he graciously endures the operation with smiles and silly faces. Marian survives; the operation he would have never received from Ukrainian doctors seems almost a cinch for Dr. Marsh.
This is not to say that Henry Marsh is filled with medical miracles; he is haunted by the death of a young Ukrainian girl he tried to save with a series of operations that went terribly, awfully wrong. Both he and Geoffrey Smith are adamant that the film is not intended to “sanitize” the scope of human suffering or make claims about one doctor’s “monopoly” on cure. Indeed, perhaps the most agonizing moment of the film features the clinic visit of a gorgeous young woman faced with a very rare, inoperable tumor beyond the help of even Dr. Marsh’s saving grace. While the two surgeons discuss the dire situation in English, the girl awaits a translation she can understand; eventually, diagnosis is postponed until she can summon her mother from Moscow. I still do not know what to think of this scene. It was a truly remarkable and panic inflicting experience, the likes of some type of terror I have never before encountered in any documentary film. I was disturbed that such a discussion was carried out in front of its dying subject, but I suppose to critique this aspect of the film would be to critique Dr. Marsh’s morals (which I otherwise agree with) and not the work of the filmmaker.
There was one other sequence in this film that perturbed me: a visit to an empty field for which Igor had drawn plans to erect a new neurosurgical hospital featuring a beautifully constructed central courtyard. This part of the documentary occurred near a discussion centered on how brain tumors commonly cause blindness before they kill. It felt it rather odd that a surgeon from a country with hardly any neurosurgical care at all should worry about aesthetics when planning the type of clinic he might have a difficult time filling with competent staff. Furthermore, it seemed a strange irony to attempt to accomplish visually appealing architecture in a hospital designed to treat those who might not be able to appreciate it. Because I felt this film was otherwise so successful at allowing the audience to walk in a neurosurgical patient’s shoes, I was distracted by the insensitivity of this particular sequence.
All in all, this film - its artful composition and its probing connections –had tremendous effect on me. Though I feel I left the theater with a dose of Dr. Marsh’s wisdom, I also left with tremendous sadness for the souls he could not save. Perhaps what The English Surgeon shows us is that God-like powers are not all they’re chalked up to be. The movie is a stunning portrait of a struggling country, a piercing look at the fate of its sickest; it is also an almost overwhelmingly sad venture into the meaning of life and the essence of humanity.
