TV is the New Reading

‘Terminal City’ is odd

“Terminal City” is absolutely on the right channel.

A drama about the trials and fears and minor victories of cancer treatment, “Terminal City” draws deep distinctions between the Big C and other ailments. It has a strong voice, forceful characters and at times harrowing humanity.

It is also filmed so incoherently that it could only really work on a channel celebrating independent film like The Sundance Channel.

“Terminal City” premiered last week with a collection of images that defy deconstruction. There’s an oncologist studying a mammogram. There’s a family squabbling through mealtime with an elephant in the room the size of a phone that won’t stop ringing and which no one will answer. And there’s a mom who is trying her very best bravely to ignore news she is deathly afraid of facing.

Swirling around the production is a useless doctor wandering around a hospital with a microphone interviewing patients about their various maladies for a live reality show called “In Treatment.” He’s got a terrible personality and his attending crew isn’t much better.

When he encounters the mom – completely by accident – she gives him an earful about her breast cancer and shows him the scars from previous biopsies and her frustration with the sickness.

The doctor is in shock, but the producers of the reality show love her candor and her screen presence and it seems that they’re going to try to build a series around her.

She’s got enough on her plate, however, with her own illness, her crass relatives and her children who are all acting out in different ways. Her husband isn’t 100 percent sure how to be supportive anymore. Their daughter is going to break herself being the perfect middle child while their older son is on drugs and their younger son has some pretty pronounced impulse control and attention-deficit issues.

Really, though, how she’d notice above her own acting out is hard to know. One of her coping mechanisms is hitting golf balls into neighboring property, destroying furniture and injuring neighbors. As for her children, she constantly celebrates their quirks and foibles, given that she doesn’t know how long she has with them, so discipline isn’t even on the table, straining the home and the marriage.

In all, it’s some amazing insight into the effects a terminal illness like cancer can have on a patient and her family. Sadly, it’s so jumbled and disorganized that whatever story there is gets lost pretty easily in the constant shuffling and reshuffling of beautiful images and muddly scenes bereft of a narrative flow or apparent unifying construct – beyond the attitude of the patient herself.

All that being said, it’s one of the more interesting presentations I’ve seen, and while there’s absolutely some language and situations, it’s relatively tame for a censor-free independent film channel.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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