Review of Doc Hollywood (1991) by Edith N — 02 Oct 2011

Never Quite Explains What Else Is There.

We have kind of a national Thing about "Real America." Even though the majority of Americans are urban dwellers and have been for a long time, we still have this sense that Real Americans live in the country. Better to be on a farm than in a city, and better to be in a small city than a large one. On the other hand, there's still this sense that the thing everyone in small towns really wants is to move to the big city. A lot of our fiction is tied in to this story, and the smart stuff acknowledges the contradictions. Then there are movies like this one, wherein you know that someone in it is going to have to make the choice between Real America and the Big City, and the movie never quite acknowledges that every choice the person has made leading up to that is going to get thrown away. Everything about that life is going to be different from what they expected, but it's okay so long as they love each other. I guess.

Doctor Benjamin Stone (Michael J. Fox) is working his last night in New York; he will be driving across country to Beverly Hills, where he is applying for a job in a high-profile plastic surgery clinic under Doctor Halberstrom (George Hamilton). In South Carolina, near the small town of Grady, he gets into an accident. He swerves to avoid some cows, plows through a fair amount of scenery, and crashes into a fence which is in the process of being built by Judge Evans (Roberts Blossom). Who promptly sentences him to community service, especially when Ben suggests that maybe the insurance company will just pay him for the fence. All Ben wants to do is get his car fixed and get to California, but while he's there, he also begins to fall for Vialula (Julie Warner), "Lou," a single mother and ambulance driver who is also working to get into law school. Lou is pursued by Hank Gordon (Woody Harrelson), and Ben is pursued by Nancy Lee Nicholson (Bridget Fonda), daughter of the mayor (David Ogden Stiers), who wants Ben to stay.

I must express confusion as to what Ben is doing going through South Carolina in the first place. I mean, I suppose it's possible that he going to do what the youts do in [i]My Cousin Vinnie[/i]--drive south first and then west along I-10. I-95 does go through South Carolina and New York both. It's just not the most efficient way of doing it. Of course, neither is driving that 1956 Porsche thousands of miles. I also found myself kind of wondering what he was planning to do as far as things like furniture. At least in [i]My Cousin Vinnie[/i], they were probably moving into dorms. It drives the plot, but it doesn't much make sense. This can be said about quite a few of the things the story presents us with. There's the whole thing with the pig, for example; yes, it shows how hard Ben is willing to work to impress Lou, but a pig can't exactly live on the scraps from Ben's breakfast, and it's made clear that Ben can't access his money. No one in the whole town seems to know how to deal with credit cards or out-of-state checks.

Small towns like this are still, twenty years later, hemorrhaging people, and it's hard to lure professionals. One of the things which rings true is that Mayor Nicholson would work so hard to convince Ben to stay. The town is fortunate enough to have a doctor, but Doctor Aurelius Hogue (Barnard Hughes) is old and in ill health. (Though the actor only died five years ago!) Hank is just an insurance agent, but he very much wants to leave. Lou is pretty much alone in that, while she plans to go to law school, she plans to follow that by returning to town. It seems as though about the only young people in town are the main characters. Emma (Amanda Junette Donatelli), Lou's daughter, is about the only child. It's a dying town, and the impression is a bit that it's still the largest town for miles around. After all, it has the hospital, and hospitals are a sign of prosperity, or at least size.

As it happens, we are just a few days short of taking a trip down to Los Angeles ourselves. (This means I will not be posting for the next couple of weeks, though I may post blog entries.) The movie doesn't give us much of Mythic Los Angeles, but Mythic Los Angeles is the underlying premise of what's so special about Ben. He's good enough to practice plastic surgery there. Remember, he's going to Beverly Hills. He is not going anywhere near Hollywood. But the implication is that he will be performing liposuction and nose jobs on starlets, and that's still Hollywood. I've said before that Los Angeles, or at least parts of it, has the feel of a Company Town. Hollywood is often a code for the whole of the city, and the Hollywood sign puts in its appearance even though there's no reason to assume that Ben can even see it from where he lives and works. (It isn't visible from quite large amounts of even just the City of Los Angeles.) When we are there and I am not posting, think, then, that we will spend very little of our vacation in sight of it ourselves.