BY WHICH or whose light do we choose to illuminate our path? That is a question that The God Committee (Cert. 15) poses. At St Augustine’s Hospital, New York City, a small group has the unenviable job of selecting which cardiac patient receives a donor organ. There is a critical shortage of these and a short shelf-life. Rapid decisions need making about who will be the lucky recipients. What is to be the committee’s guiding light in making the choice?
Left to the cardiologist Andre Boxer (Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer), it must be entirely based on pragmatic medical grounds: who has most chance of surviving — or so he claims. The hospital chaplain, Father Dunbar (Colman Domingo), a disgraced former defence attorney now ordained, challenges Boxer as he eliminates a potentially suicidal patient from the list. Evaluating a person’s character like that, he says, is risky. “If you make choices based on anything that can’t be quantified, you’re playing God.”
The testy rationalist hits back. “I’ll be the first to step aside when God walks in and votes. In ten years. I haven’t seen him yet.” Chaplain: “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Expanding on this later, Dunbar preaches of the presence of God within us. We presume and distort God’s will when all we need do is look deep inside ourselves for divine light.
Then come the ethical dilemmas. At a board meeting in 2014, do they give a dead cyclist’s heart to an affluent widow ambivalent about a transplant, an obese, bipolar doorman striving to finance his daughters through college, or a cocaine-fuelled playboy whose father, Emmett Granger (Dan Hedaya), dangles a $25-million donation to this crumbling hospital if his son gets the organ?
It is even more complicated. Most committee members are (whether declared or undisclosed) compromised or conflicted one way or other. Boxer is moving into private research on cross-species transplants. Granger was to bankroll this until he learns that the doctor is seriously in need of a new heart himself. The billionaire offers a black-market organ or it’s no deal.
Julia Stiles (Nicky Parsons in the Jason Bourne series) — the film’s primary conscience — is able to balance medical judgements with humane arguments. But she is also guarding her clandestine relationship with the self-absorbed Boxer. The committee fall short of deserving the God sobriquet, but, given each member’s circumstances, they’re doing their best. All seek a light whereby they may tread into the unknown.
The film begins with a young couple gazing at the night sky, pondering whether reaching for the stars is attainable or even desirable. This summarises the movie’s intention to explore if we can be as God. Prefacing boardroom dialogues with this scene opens out the original play. Significantly, the writer-director, Austin Stark, unlike the theatrical production, has set it in two periods: 2014 and 2021. A bit confusing. Just keep an eye on Kelsey Grammer’s hairline to know which year is which. The 2021 sequences allow us to witness the salutary consequences, seven years later, of when we on the edge of a vast universe play God. We are light years away.
On various digital platforms from 19 July