Imbedded in a New Jersey head trauma facility, Liz Garbus' crew follows the families of four young men with severe traumatic brain injury over a period of two years, through their inpatient treatment and rehabilitation experience.
The viewer has access to each family member's grief, hope and despair as they gather daily in the residential center. Confidential medical team meetings are surprisingly accessed, with questionable integrity, due to the murky due process (not addressed) of the patients and their families alike.
The documentary focuses on the emotional turmoil of each member of the four families at the rehab center. Indeed, Garbus' camera crew was allowed broad access to intimate scenes of the young patients during their diagnostic and therapeutic sessions.
For example, one of the four young men suffers seizures as well as internal bleeding, complications that result in further brain damage, while another man struggles to gain function, despite suffering new hearing loss.
The documentary is certainly dated in terms of patient confidentiality and team treatment modality; due process is sketchy and the science of brain injury and coma in the early 2000s is central to both treatment and outcomes.
When the prognosis for one patient, a black man, is dire, the documentary becomes more self-involved and patronizing. As one year passes into two for that severely brain damaged young man and his family, his doctor becomes the willing spokesperson for his trusting mother.
The doctor is shadowed by Garbus' crew as she drives, pondering aloud the wisdom of her own hopeful diagnostic statements. She continues to be cast as the central player, her suffering evidently considered to be more relatable to the audience. Unfortunately, she cannot begin to embody the quiet grief of the young man's mother and his extended family, and instead insults it.
As the doctor self-consciously tries to justify her own diagnostic excesses, she relishes the camera.
Predictably, Garbus turns the lens on her, and she, not the quietly complicit family, becomes the face of suffering at his funeral.
The result, squirmingly uncomfortable to watch, from parent/staff conference scenes where parental lack of due process and transparency beg for explanation, is relentlessly predictable from a social justice standpoint.
The breaches of confidentiality, and use of grief stricken parents who permitted access by the elite camera crew, is unsettling at best and exploitative-- then, and certainly by todays' standards.
The exploitation is most palpable as it is expressed on the faces of the dignified and grieving family at the funeral service, as they watch the camera focus on the white doctor.
It taints the entire documentary.
Other hospital staff, who present as actors, are both adequate and sterile clinicians; they are complicit as well.
The purported mission of this drama-doc is an impartial look at the science and medicine behind traumatic brain injury.
"Coma" is instead a dated documentary that earned its award as the best illustration of how the voice of a director, along with Hollywood-style access to a specialized hospital, glorifies suffering as entertainment.
It ushered in the genre of social media profitmaking, and award winning stardom, at the expense of others rights to privacy and due process.
"Coma" succeeds most at subtlety and starkly quantifying American racial inequalities in 2007, that continue to plague the society.
The viewer has access to each family member's grief, hope and despair as they gather daily in the residential center. Confidential medical team meetings are surprisingly accessed, with questionable integrity, due to the murky due process (not addressed) of the patients and their families alike.
The documentary focuses on the emotional turmoil of each member of the four families at the rehab center. Indeed, Garbus' camera crew was allowed broad access to intimate scenes of the young patients during their diagnostic and therapeutic sessions.
For example, one of the four young men suffers seizures as well as internal bleeding, complications that result in further brain damage, while another man struggles to gain function, despite suffering new hearing loss.
The documentary is certainly dated in terms of patient confidentiality and team treatment modality; due process is sketchy and the science of brain injury and coma in the early 2000s is central to both treatment and outcomes.
When the prognosis for one patient, a black man, is dire, the documentary becomes more self-involved and patronizing. As one year passes into two for that severely brain damaged young man and his family, his doctor becomes the willing spokesperson for his trusting mother.
The doctor is shadowed by Garbus' crew as she drives, pondering aloud the wisdom of her own hopeful diagnostic statements. She continues to be cast as the central player, her suffering evidently considered to be more relatable to the audience. Unfortunately, she cannot begin to embody the quiet grief of the young man's mother and his extended family, and instead insults it.
As the doctor self-consciously tries to justify her own diagnostic excesses, she relishes the camera.
Predictably, Garbus turns the lens on her, and she, not the quietly complicit family, becomes the face of suffering at his funeral.
The result, squirmingly uncomfortable to watch, from parent/staff conference scenes where parental lack of due process and transparency beg for explanation, is relentlessly predictable from a social justice standpoint.
The breaches of confidentiality, and use of grief stricken parents who permitted access by the elite camera crew, is unsettling at best and exploitative-- then, and certainly by todays' standards.
The exploitation is most palpable as it is expressed on the faces of the dignified and grieving family at the funeral service, as they watch the camera focus on the white doctor.
It taints the entire documentary.
Other hospital staff, who present as actors, are both adequate and sterile clinicians; they are complicit as well.
The purported mission of this drama-doc is an impartial look at the science and medicine behind traumatic brain injury.
"Coma" is instead a dated documentary that earned its award as the best illustration of how the voice of a director, along with Hollywood-style access to a specialized hospital, glorifies suffering as entertainment.
It ushered in the genre of social media profitmaking, and award winning stardom, at the expense of others rights to privacy and due process.
"Coma" succeeds most at subtlety and starkly quantifying American racial inequalities in 2007, that continue to plague the society.