NOT GOING QUIETLY
Greenwich Entertainment
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Nicholas Bruckman
Writer: Nicholas Bruckman, Amanda Roddy
Cast: Ady Barkan, Tracey Corder, Elizabeth Jaff, Rachael King, Ana Maria Archila, Nate Smith, Jeff Flake, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 7/10/21
Opens: October 5, 2021
Life is a crapshoot. When a couple decide to have children to complete a family, their fingers are likely crossed that they will bring forth a healthy birth and that their offspring will enjoy full happy lives albeit with the strong possibility that their health will deteriorate in old age. A two-year-old with leukemia puts all heaven in a rage, as the poet William Blake might say. A person in mid-thirties who acquires Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease (after the famous baseball player with the Brooklyn Dodgers), may well make religious folks question God’s motives. While some adults with the disease—it’s idiopathic, i.e. of unknown origin, unavoidable even by strenuous exercise, a Mediterranean diet, yoga, meditation, or picking the right parents—may resign themselves to the wasting of their muscles in this neurological nightmare, Ady Barkan is not going quietly. After receiving the crushing diagnosis from his neurologist, who gave him three to four years to live, Barkan became an activist in Congress, demanding with his group of followers that our government pass legislation for Medicare for All or Universal Health Care and to stop messing around with the reactionary idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare to allow corporations and the wealthy to pay taxes that today are way too low.
Since “Not Going Quietly” is not a biopic, we hear nothing about Barkan’s parents—one of whom is Romanian and the other Israeli—nor are we shown that he was brought up in a secular Jewish-American household and graduated from Yale Law School. Director Nicholas Bruckman, whose “Valley of Saints” is a narrative of a poor Kashmiri citizen who tries to run away, chased by the military, does not shrink away from capturing the deterioration in Barkan’s body as he goes downhill from being wheelchair bound to losing the clarity of his speech and movement in most of his body. But Barkan, who has a wife Rachael and a young son Carl who calls his daddy by the Hebrew word Abba, becomes a figure not of pity but one that thrusts him into such strenuous political activism that Time magazine has called him one of the world’s one hundred most influential people.
In addition to fighting against Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, whose politics might lead him to hand down decisions that would financially impact the health of disabled Americans, he is caught on camera buttonholing then Senator Jeff Flake on a commercial flight, begging him to vote against a right-wing supported tax bill. Despite Flake’s willingness to listen, standing up in a plaid shirt and showing empathy with the fellow in a wheelchair, he did not promise to vote the way Barkan would like. Still, this confrontation may give viewers the faulty impression that Flake was one of the large majority of ultra-conservative Republican lawmakers when in fact he was among that party’s most reasonable members (not a high bar to overcome). The talk on the aircraft went viral on social media, giving people who do not read newspapers new insight into the divisiveness of current American politics, highlighting the cruelty of self-serving politicians.
Barkan’s story is an inspiring one with limited sentimental goo, one that should give viewers the idea that perhaps our government should spend more on medical research, authorizing more money for seriously disabled people than fighting hopeless, unnecessary wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq. Thankfully ALS is a rare disease usually picked up in late middle age and not in one’s thirties as was the case with Barkan. It will make you wonder why Republicans speak and vote as though social services for ordinary people are disposable while expanding the Monroe Doctrine to cover not just the Western Hemisphere but the entire world commands the attention of today’s oft-times cruel and thoughtless policy makers.
96 minutes. © 2021 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – A-
Acting – A-
Technical –A
Overall – A-