Seldom has a film been given a better title than “You Don’t Know Jack.”
Its subject, right-to-die activist Jack Kevokian, is a hard nut to crack. At one time, he was everywhere, making headlines for his crusade for physician-assisted suicides. Time magazine put him on the cover. The headline? “Doctor Death.”
Eventually, Kevorkian went too far. After showing a shocking videotape of an assisted suicide on “60 Minutes” in 1998, he was arrested and sentenced to 10-to-25 years in prison for second-degree murder.
PAGE SIX: DR. DEATH JUST LIKE THE REST OF US
As played by Al Pacino, Kevorkian is defiant, fearless, and so convinced that his cause is the cause that it overshadowed everything else in his life. The film tracks his well-known public battles, showing him outwitting Michigan prosecutor Dick Thompson, who tried many times, unsuccessfully, to put him behind bars.
“You may call it mercy killing,” Kevorkian rails at one judge. “I call it a medical service for an incurably suffering patient.”
We see Kevorkian taking on the media, becoming savvy enough to know that Mike Wallace commanded a bigger audience than Barbara Walters, and using his connections to wangle that “60 Minutes” interview.
In the film, directed by Barry Levinson, we also learn how Kevorkian, a Michigan pathologist, became Dr. Death — he was spurred on to help people demand their right to self-determination by watching his mother die a horrible death.
Kevorkian, now 81, sees himself as a medical maverick, and he fits right in with the firebrands and loners Pacino has played to perfection in movies such as Sidney Lumet’s “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon.”
“I took [the role] from the point of view of how to portray a zealot,” says Pacino by cell phone headset, as he drives to rehearsals for “The Merchant of Venice” at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. “The real zealots are rare, they go out the window. That kind of commitment, I wanted to see what that was like.”
Pacino did not meet Kevorkian, who was released from prison in 2007, but spoke to him before production started in New York (which substitutes for Michigan in the film). He says, “There are times when you want to meet the person you’re playing. I got to know Frank Serpico. I would ask Frank, ‘What did you do when this happened?’ With Kevorkian, I just enveloped myself in the research.”
He found Kevorkian to be a misunderstood man, largely because the monastic-like doctor did not know how to deal with the public.
“It’s an advantage to fly well in a public situation,” Pacino says. “He was condemned for not having that ability. He had a simple way of dress. He looked like an absent-minded doctor. But he sent away 90 percent of the people who came to him for help. I see him as a doctor who cared for his patients. A sort-of 1960s revolutionary.”
The film, based on the book “Between the Dead and the Dying,” by Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie, deals graphically with only a few of the assisted suicides. The first, administered in the back of a Volkswagen bus, is a doozy, as Kevorkian tells Janet Adkins, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, “You wouldn’t offend me” if she changed her mind. She doesn’t and after Adkins says goodbye to her husband, Kevorkian administers the drugs that end her life.
She becomes Patient No. 1. “You Don’t Know Jack” keeps a list of the people helped by Kevorkian. It is staggering — more than 100 by the end of the film.
It took a brave soul to support Kevorkian and he had his loyalists. His friend Neal Nicol (John Goodman) assists him as does his older sister Margo. Up until her death — not an assisted suicide — she was at her brother’s side, working as his videographer so that Kevorkian had proof that his patients wanted him to help them die.
“Margo took care of everything,” says Brenda Vaccaro, 70. “She was his entire driving system. She was an executive secretary at Chrysler and she lost her job because of him.”
Vaccaro knew Pacino from their early days in New York theater, when all of today’s icons, including Dustin Hoffman, were unknowns. “Everyone was climbing a stairway to paradise then,” she says. But not everyone made it to the top. While Pacino and Hoffman’s careers soared, Vaccaro, who co-starred with Hoffman in “Midnight Cowboy,” saw hers dwindle.
Getting cast as Margo, then, rocked her world.
“This came from heaven, where all my dead friends are saying, ‘Get Brenda a part,’” she says, cracking up.
Vaccaro says that Pacino would rehearse on weekends in his apartment and that production was collaborative. “Al doesn’t allow you to be intimidated,” she says. “He doesn’t play the big star at all.”
When Margo dies, Kevorkian fills the gap with Janet Good, a former unemployment insurance claims processor who became an activist and was elected to the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame. She is played with mordant wit by Susan Sarandon. Pacino had never worked with the Oscar- winning actress and he says, “What a pleasure. Janet was another comrade and you try to give the impression they seemed to like each other.”
Good takes over as videographer, interviewing the patients, but as the story unfolds, she decides she needs Kevorkian’s services after she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She breaks the bad news to him while baking chocolate chip cookies. “Make yourself useful,” she says, handing Jack a cookie sheet. “Put that in the oven. So what’s new with you?”
The women in Kevorkian’s life, says screenwriter Adam Mazer, provided a rudder for him. In a powerful scene, Good, who becomes patient No. 82, tells Kevorkian, “I’m afraid for you. Nobody knows you. How did it feel when your mother was dying?” She is finally able to break through Kevorkian’s wall of isolation. “I failed my mother. I was lost,” he says to her. And before he gives Good the death drugs, he says, “Give my love to Margo.”
“Janet had the bedside manner Jack lacked,” says Mazer. “She worried about who he would have when she was gone. And she was right. He did wander.”
Mazer interviewed, Good’s widower, Ray, as well as Kevorkian, and says that the doctor, “was brilliant, but he wasn’t brilliant enough to realize that he couldn’t represent himself in that last trial. He couldn’t comprehend that the law was the law.”
Asked if he thought “You Don’t Know Jack” might be too bleak for audiences, Pacino says, “I don’t know. You look at your movie one way. You’re lucky if you can at least get across what you feel. The best thing is when people like it.”
He will turn 70 on April 25 and says after acting for four decades, big roles like Jack Kevorkian, or Shylock still excite him. “Your energy has to come from the source. You have to feel connected to what you’re doing. Otherwise, it’s too exhausting.”