Living in Emergency

Directed by Mark Hopkins

(Not Rated)

***

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You might expect a movie about doctors bringing health care to Third World countries to be “a feature-length canonization and call to arms,” said Lucy Barber in The Boston Globe. But this documentary about four volunteers working for Doctors Without Borders turns out to be something different. “Rather than spending an hour and a half preying on the guilt of First World viewers, director Mark Hopkins focuses his gaze on the doctors’ motivations.” Hopkins’ unsparing camera captures not only graphic scenes of surgery but the doctors’ losing struggles “to keep from being overwhelmed by the world’s woes,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Globally, more than 2 billion people lack access to medical care, and these doctors realize that their work is “a drop in a bottomless bucket.” One doctor deals with the stress through ironic detachment, another by smoking, and another by partying hard. Look, “they’re heroes, as far as I’m concerned,” said V.A. Musetto in the New York Post. But Hopkins’ film “lacks focus, meandering along” instead of maintaining urgency. Despite its important subject, Living in Emergency seems “more suited to PBS than to the big screen.”