If you think after decades of “E.R.”, “House,” “Scrubs” and “Grey’s Anatomy” that young doctors coming of age, falling in love or in lust is a genre that has no surprises left in it, you’re right. And “The Heart Specialist,” a film written and directed by a physician with dreams of Hollywood glory, proves it.
A 2006 film only now finding its way to theaters because of the presence of a pre-”Avatar” Zoe Saldana (barely in it) , Dr. Dennis Cooper must have knocked off this script while watching “Scrubs” re-runs in the break room. This is “Scrubs” told totally from a black doctor’s point of view.
“This is the story of a playa in a white coat,” Dr. Sidney Zachary narrates. He’s a teaching physician at Palmville Memorial on the Florida coast. But he isn’t only about healing, imparting wisdom and ethics on his young disciples. He does stand-up comedy, part of his “research” on the effect of laughter on health and healing.
“True love is like a prostate exam. We know we need it, but it scares us to death.”
Ba-DOOM-boom.
And he’s narrating/transcribing his thoughts on his young residents which he hopes will let him do what his idol, Michael Crichton (“E.R.”, “Jurassic Park”) did — become a rich novelist.
“Let a fella spit a best sella,” he wishes. As played by Wood Harris, Dr. Z. is a “House” in the House, a bit too flip and fly to be confidence inspiring. Is he a Harvard grad?
“Guadela-Harvard,” he cracks.
Donna (Saldana) is his partner a crime, a nurse and friend who turns his notes into typed prose. And they’re both a little worried over the handsome, swaggering new kid in class, Dr. Ray Howard (Brian White), “the playa in the white coat.” He’s arrogant, smart and a serious womanizer.
“I’m like the Star Trek Enterprise,” he says, a line that needed fixing. “I take these women places where they ain’t never been before.”
Dr. Z., with his words and by his example, hopes to mold Dr. Howard into somebody who isn’t just in medicine for the money. Odd, considering Dr. Z. is just in medicine for material that he can turn into a book that will make him rich.
Cooper convinced assorted well-known character actors to take bit parts — Marla Gibbs, Ed Asner and Jenifer Lewis. He cast against type using Harris, best known as a gangster on “The Wire,” as a doctor. It’s a bit jarring to hear diagnoses delivered as though the “doctor” has never uttered those words before, or laced with street epithets, to see an attending physician lighting up a joint every spare moment. Harris is miscast.
Dr. Z. has to give Dr. H. some heart and empathy before he can succeed in love and medicine. He has to finish his book and reveal his “big secret.”
Dr. H. has to get over himself – - “Medicine is in books. Swagger? It’s in the blood.”
But Dr. C.’s movie, opening in select cities this weekend, is seriously played, amateurish. It has so little crackle that the guy couldn’t have gotten a staff writer job even on the later seasons of all those TV doctor shows he plainly drew inspiration from. He’s made a movie whose medicine is sound, but whose swagger is weak. He may want to be Michael Crichton. Let’s hope he didn’t quit his day job.
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