On WFF #6: Deep drilling
Decider previews the Wisconsin Film Festival
If you think you’ve got problems, then how about having a golf ball-sized tumor in your head, which gives you epilepsy and leads to blindness and death in a few years? That’s Marian Dolishny’s problem. Or how about being a brilliant British neurosurgeon with a dry wit and a deep, abiding love of humanity, who is expected to work miracles and must learn to live with his mistakes? That’s Henry Marsh’s problem.
We first meet Marsh, who is the main subject in Geoffrey Smith's documentary The English Surgeon (April 3 at 9:30 p.m. and April 5 at 7:45 p.m., Orpheum Stage Door), in his woodshop building a freight box with a jigsaw and drill press. At first, it’s funny how he cavalierly puts his hands in harm's way. It's almost a quirk, but it’s also a window into his ethos. He explains that brain surgery is in some ways very similar to dentistry and can be very violent—comparing it to Russian roulette but with two revolvers.
"You’ve got one revolver called treatment or surgery, and the other revolver, which is no treatment," he says in a voice not unlike John Cleese's. "Would you want to lose your personality or your intellect or your ability to think? Because that’s the sort of risks we’re talking about."
The freight box Marsh builds is used to transport a surgical stool to Kiev, where Marsh helps his friend and colleague Igor Kurilets. The two attempt to bring Ukrainian neurosurgery out of the Soviet era despite the crush of a bureaucratic and political backlash. Marsh brings his expertise as well as any tools or instruments he can spare from his practice in London. One example of the disparity in Kiev: When Marsh presents drill bits that were discarded after only one use, Kurilets exclaims that they will last him 10 years. In surgery, Marsh can’t help but comment dryly that the batteries are running down on the cordless drill that Kurilets uses to put a hole in patient Marian Dolishny’s skull.
The surgery is the exciting part, but the excruciating part is when Marsh consults with patients— deciding when surgery is or isn’t appropriate and how to relay a message of life or death. Marsh constantly faces the dilemma of whether to provide hope or the truth, and Smith expertly displays Marsh’s British knack for understatement and reserve without concealing his deep passion and pain.
For more previews of the Wisconsin Film Festival, please see the On WFF archive.
