Part 2 (The Waiting Room)

I thought there were some good storytelling elements in the film.  For the most part the filmmaker let everything happen around the lens of the camera as it recorded it.  I was sucked into the drama as the father was dealing with his emotions and a very sick child.  I was concerned when the guy who needed surgery for cancer and he couldn’t get it.  I was affected by the elderly patient who was having back pain and couldn’t get any kind of treatment for it.  He had a job laying carpet and could not afford proper medical treatment or to stop working even though it was causing him so much pain.  There was also some genuine emotion as a man with a drug problem cried.  He had nowhere to go and it was sad to see this happen to another human being.

I did not enjoy the voice over’s as I felt they took me out of the story.  Everything else in the film, with the exception of the music, which also didn’t work, came out of what was happening in the natural environment.  To take these people into a recording studio and have them overdub lines of written dialogue made it seem a little bit fake.  There was no need to distort the reality of the situation.

The music was also really annoying in the few parts it was used.  At the beginning when they showed moving camera footage of the waiting room accompanied by music, I was pulled out of the film.  There just seemed to be no need for the music as the images did enough to tell the story on their own.

There were some shots shown in the movie that just didn’t work and looked sloppy.  The shots taken outside with the natural light did not work.  It was hard to see the people and looked like I was staring at a blank screen.  It was supposed to be emotional and have tension to see this guy outside who could not get the urgent surgery he needed for his cancer, with his wife.

There were other shots taken with heads cut off.  It just looked unprofessional and did not add to the storytelling at all.

My biggest complaint about the movie is that it does not give me enough information and enough context.  They barely even mention the fact that the hospital is in Oakland.  They don’t say what part of Oakland so that leaves a little to be desired.

The film would have worked better if they had gone to more than one emergency room.  Had they gone to an emergency room in an affluent part of town, they could have used it in stark contrast with the one featured in the film.  It’s hard to judge and say that all emergency rooms are like this, or that this is the problem with the health care system, etc, because of the small sample size.  How does this emergency room compare to an emergency room in San Francisco.

Because of this, I am also left with a sense of not knowing where I am during the film.  They also don’t give much context in terms of time.  What year is this?  What month?  They only show one shot of a clock to let the audience know the time.  This is a mistake because so much of the frustration of being in a waiting room, that the film tries to get across to its audience, is that the people have to wait an extremely long time.  

   

 Having watched the film, I have no idea how long these people were waiting.

To show the passage of time the filmmaker tried to show some time lapsed montages/sequences.  These came off as a little bit cliché (is it cliché for me to say that?).  During these sequences the filmmaker also chose to play some music.  This did not work for me.  If the filmmaker had wanted to convey the passage of time to the viewer it could have been done by simply showing more shots of the clock.  A shot of the clock at the beginning, and then one at the end would have been very effective. 

I have no idea how long these patients spent in the waiting room/emergency room.  The filmmaker could have put up some captions that would have let me know how many hours they had to wait.  I never get this sense.  Time is not dealt with in real terms, only abstract ones.  This is a mistake.  I want to experience time in terms that I can measure.

I would also have liked to have found out how much money it cost for these people, many of them very poor, to receive treatment.  Since this is the biggest difference between the Canadian and American systems, I am very interested to find out about this aspect of the American system.  I think this information is very important and the audience needs to hear it.  They do get to see it in the shots of the faces of the people as they find out what they have to pay, but the audience is left having to translate this into real dollar and cents terms that it can understand.  This is information I want to know and the film never gives it to me.