Review of Britannia Hospital (1982) by Ryan M — 12 Aug 2009

Lindsay Anderson has never been one for thematic economy, but he almost manages it here. The achievement is all the more compelling for the fact that 'Britannia Hospital' is as loaded with content as any previous Anderson work (there's Guignol absurdism and polemical imagery aplenty, don't worry).

The satire is ever-so-slightly more focused though, and Anderson's narrowed concern results in a tighter film that, while it sprawls, sprawls within clear demarcations. Basically what goes on is a complex burlesque of the eternal debate over health care (pretty relevant today, no?).

The myriad sides ticked off in the synopsis above ("striking workers, ruthless unions..." etc.) are revealed to be mutually obstructing to the point of total impasse. Anderson finds (very) black humor in the endlessly conflicting interests of his characters, and the script is free-wheeling enough that its essential pattern of "A resists B who resists C" never really gets boring.

The world of the film is so alive intellectually that even the paid-by-the-hour painters are self-righteous! One potential fault of the film however is that Anderson assumes a good deal about character motivation, which may detract from the "productiveness" of the satire.

The adminstrators are assumed to be money-loving and the unionworkers assumed to be self-regarding to the point of inhumanity, while royalty is forever parading its anachronistic effeteness. Anderson tempers this a bit by introducing McDowell as the cloused-mouthed observer in the machine, but then he yields to fatalism and has him summarily sacrificed by the wacko Frankenstein surgeon.

It's clear that Anderson believes the human capacity for destruction dwarfs its generative counterpart, but then I'm not sure a tired thesis like that justifies a 2 hour film like 'Britannia Hospital' (especially one with so much untapped potential in its cast).

I give it 4 stars mostly because it's a riot and because it's not unintelligent.