Movies: John Q.

The 21st anniversary of early 21st century propaganda for faith, religion and nationalized medicine

This movie, released for distribution in theaters by a Warner Bros. subsidiary studio 21 years ago, propagandizes faith, religion and statism. John Q., which is not without value, was overhyped at the time of release. Philosophically, the hammy drama lacks realism, even on its terms. Denzel Washington’s early 21st century star vehicle is not among his best pictures or performances. His title character doesn’t earn the story’s pivot from hard-working family man to gun-toting criminal.

Suspenseful John Q. deals with serious issues, prompting such questions as would you initiate the use of force to save your child?—is the U.S. health care system rational?—is someone’s need a claim on the lives of others? John Q. dramatizes its position that health care is a right. The movie deserves credit for depicting various value-oriented issues:

• Whether health care’s a right

• The sleaze, role and bad influence of today’s press

• The moral dilemma of suicide

• The ethics of a medical emergency

• The nature and responsibility of parenting

• The proper role of police

These are all touched upon more substantially in this film, directed by Nick Cassavetes (actor-director John’s son with actress Gena Rowlands), more seriously than in most Hollywood pictures made by 2002. As he does in his other turn-of-the-century film, The Notebook, Cassavetes fixates on money, social status and skin color.

However, John Q. consistently shows its own thematic flaws.

“Your word is your bond,” Denzel Washington’s Chicagoland factory worker tells his dying son after the boy collapses on a baseball diamond during a game. Then, he lies to the child: “I’ll never leave you.” Ethical exceptions aside, this is a wicked lie in the context of John Q.’s plot. By this point, the dad holds an entire emergency room hostage at gunpoint in order to get his son a heart transplant, forcing the hospital, represented by a bureaucrat played the late Anne Heche, to extend credit and assign a surgeon (capably played by James Woods) to operate.

John Q. trips all over its premise—faith and religion—which is cast in the opening scene, complete with a cross and heavenly choir on Aaron Zigman’s score. That an angelic white woman—recklessly driving a luxury sedan while violating every traffic law—could choose to become an organ donor is itself either a mystery or the basis for a more original plot (i.e., why is she driving like a bat out of hell?) John Q. confuses religion with virtue too many times, reveling in self-sacrifice, trivializing suicide and depicting in the only child and dying son—the impetus for Washington’s initiation of the use of force—a kind of fantasized miniature adult. It’s heartfelt. But it’s artificial.

The best John Q. performance is by an unknown actor named James Finnerty. He appears in a few scenes as the boy’s nurse. These are compelling scenes, chiefly thanks to Finnerty’s single-minded performance, because his is the only character to consistently act upon rational values—like an Objectivist, he values life (which means life here on earth) as the ultimate standard—and his character means it. Others in the cast are fine—Kimberly Elise as grocery cashier, wife and mother, Robert Duvall going through motions as a similar character to the policeman he played in the soon-to-be-reviewed Falling Down, the late Ray Liotta as a backslapping police chief—and there’s a string of heavy-handed cameos plugging nationalized health care toward the end.

This late addition by Cassavetes, who thanked writer-director Mike Binder and acknowledged Dr. Mehmet Oz for consulting on John Q.’s heart transplant scenes in the end credits, is revealing. Propaganda for government-run medicine based on the fallacy that health care is a right—the movie’s message—drives a movie made nearly 40 years after enactment of socialized medicine for old people, Medicare, which is based on that moral premise. John Q., released eight years before the last dagger was plunged into the medical profession with enactment of ObamaCare, never admits, let alone accounts for, the role of the government in health care, the very idea it promotes.

Sanctimonious cameo clips pitch the poison that’s made situations like John Q.’s a daily dilemma for tens of millions of Americans suffering under ObamaCare—the system the movie proposes as a cure. That these sermons come from self-aggrandizing hucksters such as Arianna Huffington, who’s been reduced to hustling getting a good night’s sleep, Hillary Clinton, who infamously blamed a movie for the September 11, 2012 mass murder of Americans by Islamic terrorists, and racist Jesse Jackson mocks whatever’s decent about John Q.

Ultimately, the truth that health care is not a right, as Leonard Peikoff brilliantly explained in his December 11, 1993, Orange County, California, speech will prevail. Apparently, John Q’s weapons and tactical police advisers reported to Cassavetes that a real-life emergency room (ER) crisis preceded the fictional film when a 26 year-old man named Henry Masuka sought immediate medical care for his infant son on New Year's Eve in 1999. Masuka had been told there were no pediatricians on site and he’d have a 45-minute wait before a doctor could examine his son. He took a doctor hostage using what appeared to be a gun. When he emerged from the ER, he was shot and killed by police. An unloaded pellet gun, which one policeman suggests may have been planted after the crisis, was later found. The incident and killing, however, contrary to John Q, happened in Canada, a nation with nationalized medicine—total government control of medicine—not in America’s Midwest.

This means that John Q. dramatizes an emergency moral dilemma essentially made possible by the political philosophy underpinning Canada’s national health care system—not America’s original, more capitalist system.

None of this is relevant to the merits of John Q. As is, it could’ve dramatized one man’s justifiable action under total or partial government medical control. The Hollywood propaganda pleads for national health care, which happened soon thereafter when Barack Obama, aided by those who accept John Q’s moral premise, signed, ordered and mandated ObamaCare into U.S. law. While watching this film about working parents in crisis, it’s impossible not to notice that, 21 years later, everyone’s being held hostage to what one man forced upon everyone—ultimately, at the point of a gun.