Commercials director goes to bat for his sixty - nine year old mom when problems with a redo of a partial hip replacement leave her intellectually and physically highly damaged following a low blood pressure induced coma possibly caused by loss of blood during an operation.
A number of problems rear up in this piece that just cannot be viewed as side issues. The time and effort put in by the director to bring a civil case to court just did not ring true as a desire to " help mom"...I suspect he saw this family tragedy as an opportunity to make and sell this doc...nothing heinous about this but one has to wonder.
Lots of moments of interest which make the film more " entertainment " in the bigger sense of the word than an honest, objective recounting of what really took place. The behavior of uncle doctor screams there's more here than meets the eye, the use of monies other than mom's is another source of concern...two of the families on mom's side are well to do but there's only a single seeming misleading reference to any money ponied up to pay for mom's care that come from anywhere but mom's assets. and John Q Public taxpayer.
Never explained how the court case was fully funded...would seem to have been way more than the 100k figure thrown out.
The decisions made by the plaintiffs' attorney as to how to present the case seem not to make any sense and are just mentioned as " to provide best chance of winning ".
If one reads between the lines a viewer can see how the defense could have attacked the allegations of the plaintiff but the only time spent on showing the various evil strategies is to show them looking suspicious during depositions. There's an obvious absence explanation of the defense arguements used in court. I can see problems with the course of medical treatments but was there negligence involved or more a confluence of negatives that fall short of the requirement for compensation. I would have preferred a more balanced presentation as I was left with questions about several of the events dished up by the film maker that caused me to feel I was being manipulated.
