Early on in American Doctor, Poh Si Teng’s rattling new documentary, North Carolina doctor Mark Perlmutter reprimands his director. He’s seated at his dining-room table, discussing the agonizing organizational process healthcare workers generally practice when in the middle of a mass-casualty event. For horrific illustrative purposes of what he’s witnessed on the job, Perlmutter pulls up on his computer an image of Palestinian children who’ve been killed by an Israeli government-approved bombing attack. Teng hastily pans her camera away when Perlmutter swivels around his laptop for viewers. She rationalizes that it doesn’t need to be seen for the point to be understood — that it might be disrespectful to the victims’ families. But Perlmutter sternly corrects her assumptions. Keeping out of the frame or pixelating the image in the film’s final cut would amount to journalistic malpractice, he believes; he’s also been repeatedly told by the families he’s worked with that they want the wider world to be confronted with what’s being done to their children. “You’re not doing them a service by not showing them,” he says.
Its months-long shoot beginning on Christmas 2024, American Doctor unwaveringly stays in this register — of looking squarely at what it would be more comfortable to turn away from. It seems to especially be thinking, audience-wise, about those who’ve either been ignorant of or simply been in denial about the magnitude of the Israeli government’s atrocities against the Palestinian population in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. It contains many scenes where it watches its eponymous trio of doctor subjects — Perlmutter, Thaer Ahmad, and Feroze Sidhwa, all of whom are war-zone veterans — conduct oratorically commanding, situation-clarifying, and statistic-forward video interviews with Israel-allegiant legacy news media and take part in in-person and virtual seminars where they expound on the unbelievable violence (particularly the violence inflicted on children, who are, it’s noted, killed 600 times more often in Gaza than in Ukraine) they’ve seen while volunteering in Gaza. One of American Doctor’s most crushing moments comes not from any of Teng’s own footage. A compilation of videos shot by Perlmutter, it first shows groups of Palestinian children cheering, dancing, and playing before it transitions to images of them dead or writhing in pain on hospital slabs. Later in American Doctor, a teenage boy who’d been miraculously saved — and had skirted becoming an amputee — is soon incinerated by a bomb in a room from which he was about to get discharged. Perlmutter predicts, mid-operation on a young girl, that she’ll likely lose both her legs and one of her arms.
Though some of American Doctor’s more expository storytelling can feel tailored toward those not yet caught up with reality, and though its intermittent interruptions of emotion-steering music feel grossly inappropriate for a work of grim nonfiction, American Doctor’s more didactic impulses don’t curtail its testimonial and journalistic force. It bracingly provides boots-on-the-ground documentation of the crisis in Gaza, where there’s plenty of visual corroboration by Teng of the Israel Defense Forces blatantly and illegally, according to Geneva Convention stipulations, targeting hospitals; it salutes the perilous, traumatizing work of healthcare workers willing to risk their lives to prevent the loss of others’.
The diverse backgrounds of its central triumvirate effectively suggest the uncomplicated truth that responding to the horrors at hand should not come with ideological or ethnic caveats. (Perlmutter is Jewish, only fairly recently deprogrammed from the anti-Palestinian propaganda he was raised to believe as unequivocal truth; Sidhwa is Zoroastrian; and Ahmad is Palestinian, a fact that has made his outspokenness more precarious than his peers and consistently made it harder for him to get red-tape-free approval from both U.S. and Israeli officials to volunteer in Gaza despite him being born in Chicago.) The movie is a sobering reminder that the supposed historical complexity regularly cynically cited by right-wing proponents of Israel’s inhumane actions does not justify the barbarity American Doctors’ everyday heroes fight against.
Juan Collado and Destiny Checho in Mad Bills to Pay. Courtesy of The Criterion Channel. Header image courtesy of Watermelon Pictures.
It decidedly does not go over well when Ricardo (Juan Collado) announces that he’s going to be a father to his mother, Andrea (Yohanna Florentino), and his 16-year-old sister, Sally (Nathaly Navarro). Andrea can’t conceal her disgust. “You, of all people,” she groans, “should not have a child.” And upon finding out who the mother is, Sally condescendingly laughs so giddily that it sounds closer to a shriek.
In Mad Bills to Pay, written and directed by Joel Alfonso Vargas and recently made available to stream on The Criterion Channel, it doesn’t take long to understand Andrea and Sally’s dismissiveness. Ricardo, a 19-year-old slacker, still lives at home and does not seem to have bigger ambitions in life besides going out at night. His self-appointed job is whipping up homemade cocktails — among them are the cutesily named Pikachu Lemonhead and Kirby Punch — by day in the family apartment’s kitchen and shilling them from a tugged-around cooler on the beach. He’s gotten pregnant a soft-spoken 16-year-old named Destiny (Destiny Checo). Despite her reservations, he persuades her to keep the baby; to, since her parents aren’t very happy about what’s going on, move in with him; and that he’s going to try his best to step up and provide for them both.
A favorite at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Mad Bills to Pay only had about 30 pages of traditional script to work with, largely to mollify investors. Mostly everything else was improvised by its blend of professional and first-time actors. Gifted with a good eye, Vargas has no trouble giving Mad Bills to Pay the kind of fly-on-the-wall ambiance that has won him not-unearned comparisons to realism paragon John Cassavetes. His firsthand familiarity with the movie’s Bronx setting makes everything feel worn in — comfortable, but also comfortable in the distinct way that can feel close to a trap. The longer one stays in the place they grew up, the more it feels like its own pocket of hell, one’s hopes for breaking out of it dwindling with every successive year.
Not especially dramatic and not especially funny, Mad Bills to Pay doesn’t really have bigger ambitions besides evoking the dread of young parenthood and, particularly, a certain kind of person alongside whom Vargas grew up: “tornado people who really had this predilection for self-sabotage,” he called the type in an interview earlier this year with IndieWire. His conjuring is well-observed, sympathetic to but not coddling about the convergence of things that have stunted Ricardo so much: his absentee father; him not feeling confident about the opportunities available to him beyond high school; his ability to fall back on his mother no matter if he’s getting arrested for a trivial crime or slumped against her front door, drunk. But I’m not sure Mad Bills to Pay amounts to much more than a conjuring, burnished by the plaintive shots of its main setting and its surplus of circuitous conflict between Ricardo — who in addition to being a fuck-up is a stubborn anti-vaxxer — and the three main wiser-than-him women in his life. Still, its ambivalent final shot, caught amid the joyous commotion of a baby shower, will stay with me.
Peterson Reviews 