As I watched director Lance Daly’s medical thriller The Good Doctor, I kept thinking about a particular bit from the podcast Doug Loves Movies. In it, comedian Paul F. Tompkins describes character actor Jeffrey Wright’s “histrionic” performance in Source Code, wherein Wright utilizes an unnecessary prop cane and blustery cadence for a minor character in a popcorn action movie.
In The Good Doctor, former Numbers star Rob Morrow similarly approaches his supporting role. As chief resident Dr. Waylans, he delivers his lines with a weird mumble and fiddles with a pair of glasses that he removes by disconnecting the magnetic bridge. He was all I could focus on, and not in a good way. The theatrical quirks were distracting, not that there was much to distract from in this sleepy indie.
Morrow’s unconvincing vocal affect is often directed at Orlando Bloom, who portrays Martin Blake, an eager young doctor on the verge of earning his residency at a California hospital. The film works overtime to establish the British Blake as a lonely man far from the familiar comforts of home and family. He eats microwave dinners alone in his bare, beach front apartment and leads a literally and figuratively sterile life. Then he meets Diane (Riley Keough), an apathetic teenage patient with a serious kidney infection. Blake soon becomes obsessed with her and goes to extreme links to keep his little Lolita sick and under his care. When his actions result in her death, however, he works to hide his misdeeds, even if it means killing again.
Medical thrillers present the dark side of people putting their lives in someone’s hands, a concept The Good Doctor portrays more subtly than most. While it doesn’t have the suspenseful punch of similar titles like Extreme Measures, the God complex still manages to rear its ugly head. Bloom plays Blake as awkward and unassuming, his boyish good looks doubling as a façade for the over-ambitious nature that lurks beneath. There are moments when he reveals his true self, however – when asked why he became a doctor, he puts respect before helping people, a response that partly explains why he endangers his young patient. When he originally cures Diane, her family showers him with thanks, their adulation becoming a drug to a man desperate for recognition. Diane becomes less a love interest than an opportunity to strengthen his reputation, a manufactured damsel in distress for his conquering hero.
Despite all its promise, however, The Good Doctor falls limp because it never encourages any emotional connection with Blake or his victims; Diane has so little personality that when she dies, it’s like watching a goldfish float to the top of a bowl. When Blake is blackmailed by an orderly who claims to have information relating to Diane’s death, the lack of sympathy towards him eliminates any sense of urgency. By the second half, Morrow’s magnetic glasses became the most interesting thing on screen, as the story ultimately gets bogged down by forced conflicts and a slow, aimless pace.
The Good Doctor is now on VOD and in limited release.