Assisted Suicide Comes to Movies

 

New film shows the “lighter” side of assisted suicide

By Dave Andrusko
Over the months, I’d read about “The Farewell Party,” which opened this week. The movie is set in a “Jerusalem retirement home in which one resident, an amateur inventor, devises a ‘mercy-killing machine,’” according to the New York Times’ Stephen Holden.

The “joke” is on several levels. Once they “assist” one man to die, word gets out and there is a rush to take advantage of the ‘service.’ And, of course, if you are of a mind, it is easy to poke fun at the behavior of elderly people battling dementia and Alzheimer’s.
The title– “The Farewell Party” — is to suggest that assisting in a suicide is in the end something that “friends” do for one another in a lighthearted sort of way and for the “best” of reasons. Indeed the movie reviewers (at least in the headlines) describe the film, which won four Israeli Academy Awards, as “The Lighter Side of Euthanasia.”

I have no intention of seeing a film. You can see the official trailer on YouTube. From that trailer and several reviews, we can draw, I believe, a few conclusions.
First–and to be honest, I can’t and wouldn’t want to get by this–is the opening of the trailer and, apparently, near the very beginning of the movie.
The key figure is “Yehezkel “ who is, according to a review in The Forward, “a grandfatherly teddy bear of a man whose compassion sometimes runs ahead of his common sense.”
Ezra Glinter continues

In the first scene we see him making a prank call to a neighbor suffering from cancer. With the help of a homemade voice modulator — among other things, Yehezkel is an amateur inventor — he convinces her that he’s God, and although she’s definitely going to heaven, there are actually no vacancies right now, so she should continue with her treatments.

Pretty funny, right? Even funnier when the confused woman “reverse dials ‘God’ and gets Levana [Yeheskel’s wife] instead.” Levana “stumbles for a second before telling her that God is in the bathroom.”

Glinter calls “The Farewell Party” a “black comedy.” Holden prefers to describe the movie as a comedy “about euthanasia [which] steers a careful course between humor and pathos while playing down overtly political and religious arguments for and against assisted suicide.”
Everybody gets in on the “fun,” including a retired police officer who offers tips about how to avoid being prosecuted. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

But in this film which supposedly does not “overtly” make the case for assisted suicide, who should help Yeheskel build the Kevorkian-like machine? Dr. Daniel, “a retired veterinarian and a resident of the retirement home who has put down many animals. He agrees to help Yehezkel perfect the design of a machine that will allow Max to end his own life by pushing a button.”

Get it? Put down a dog, put down an elderly retirement home patient. What’s the dif?
There is only one holdout: Levana. But, not to worry. “Her attitude softens,” Holden tells us, when her early-stage Alzheimer’s worsens and “she realizes to her horror that she is ‘disappearing.’”
The other consideration in this film which does not “overtly” make the case for assisted suicide is very important. “The characters are in a remarkably good situation,” Glinter writes. “Their retirement community is comfortable, with a big sun-lit cafeteria, a swimming pool and a garden.” 
We are to infer that the residents “band together” to take charge of their lives–or, in this case their deaths–because you know how those doctors are: they just you to live and live and live.

But if people in these comfortable settings “need” assisted suicide, how about all those who don’t have such favorable situation, let alone support? Don’t they “need” assistance even more?
Of course, you can’t help thinking of “Obvious Child,” a “romantic comedy” about abortion–about lethal childish irresponsibility dressed up as coming-of-age moment for a morally tone-deaf part-time comic.

The message in both films is if we can laugh at something–helping someone kill themselves or killing helpless babies–how serious should we be taking the whole thing.
The unspoken sentiment. Lighten up. CAN’T YOU TAKE A JOKE?
Sure, I can. But I can’t, and I won’t, take/accept taking lives.

Source: NRLC News