Review of The Hospital (1971) by Craig T — 05 Mar 2011

Having grown up on See No Evil, Hear No Evil, The Lonely Guy and The In-Laws, I'd never seen the true potential of Arthur Hiller as a director. The ultimate concern of Hiller, whose best film this arguably is by far, and Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the high-spirited screenplay, is not the hospital but a class structure that has grown so complex that it allows people to be forgotten to death, and is so full of awful contradictions that only escape, by one means or another, seems rational.

Hiller, who's a much better director than Carpool or An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn could ever suggest, works beautifully with Chayefsky. It isn't just that he finds outstanding performances from George C. Scott and Diana Rigg, but he has impeccably cast the film down to roles that are so minor they rely as much on raw mannerism as on dramatic technique. And Hiller's camera is mobile, roaming the hospital corridors, helping to create a sense of action and movement, reflecting the chaos of confusion in the place.

It starts as a comedy of errors, and one of the delicate things about that genre is its penchant for going out of control while endeavoring to outdo itself. Chayefsky has sidestepped this tidily by confining his absurd elements to a subplot while navigating his central story down a lingering, forlorn night with a bizarre doctor and an even more bizarre woman.

The medical establishment working as a metaphor for American chaos, the movie begins with hospital scenes that appear to evoke the M*A*S*H gang in private practice. For a kickoff, a diabetic intern is ill-omened enough to fall asleep after scoring with a nurse on a hospital bed. He's presumed to be the bed's comatose patient, and is unintentionally killed by an intravenous food supply. Come morning, a nurse and two doctors will also depart, largely since they were wearing the incorrect ID bracelets at an unfortunate time.

Administrating this disorder as chief of staff, Scott barely minds. He's left his wife, thrown his disheveled Marxist son out of the house, amuses suicidal daydreams, and splurges his nights in bleak unity with a quart of vodka. Throughout the first half of this black comedy about disillusionment, he's a character close to the cartoon caricature one might expect, but by midpoint, as the hospital disintegrates about him, a surprising thing occurs.

He meets Rigg, a former SDS, acidhead and nurse who lives with her foolish father among a clan of Native Americans. She's there to guide the story into its languishing, desolate night, which includes some of Chayefsky's best non-Network writing.

Unsuccessful in a suicide attempt as in, evidently, everything else, Scott hears the girl's story and then tells his own. Their monologues, told in the mutedly lit and anxiously closed-in doctor's office, exercise high-quality writing, acting and direction to shift the movie away from the comedy of errors du jour and into the night of terror that satire necessarily veils. Their meeting may seem initially like merely another case of Solitary Midlife Meets Right Youth, but soon it gets a lot more freshly complex than that.

The morning after is teeming with half-baked spiritual revelations. Community activist protests and outlandish flukes that are clarified in rather tender flashbacks. It's here that we start longing again that Chayefsky and director Arthur Hiller had settled on farce, had let science yield the casualties, rather than art.

However in a sense, the movie's conclusion is part of its splendor. If we were left thinking the hospital had unthinkingly and accidentally committed murder, we'd be back on the humanist panel in the campaign against knowledge. As it is, Chayefsky's strange and unforeseen ending proposes that people, even psychos, may always exploit the establishment for their own exclusive intent.