I hadn't heard about the movie, The Physician, and just happened to find it in NetFlix, with a 4.5 star rating. That's a high score and so I thought I'd watch it. I was glad I did. It's the kind of movie that takes the viewer away to another time and place, and for most of the 150 minute-running time I was enchanted.
First I was hooked by the time period, 11th century in England, and the character Rob Cole, who lost his mother to the "side" sickness (appendicitis). Rob ends up the apprentice of an itinerant doctor who goes from town to town selling his skills. He sets bones, pulls out teeth, amputates, and meantime Rob Cole is learning how to do the same. When his teacher (Barber) gets a cataract operation from a Jewish physician, Rob learns of a famous doctor-philosopher-scientist in Persia, Ibn Sina. Pretending to be a Jew, Rob goes to Isfahan to learn from this master. (Jews were supposedly tolerated in this Muslim world, but not Christians.)
This is the part I love -- when Rob journeys to another world, with an expansive desert that looks like an ocean of sand, and the people and culture that are very different from what he has known.
Rob ends up a student of the great Ibn Sina, a historical figure, who was a famous Muslim physician-scientist-philospher-thinker.
Dramatic events happen in the movie: Rob falls in love; there is a battle between two competing leaders; and a bubonic plague breaks out in Isfahan. Rob figures out the fleas are the carriers of the disease and is instrumental in halting the disease. He also makes headway in his medical learning and understands that the side-sickness that killed his mother is caused by an infected appendix, knowledge which he applies in the movie.
The film has a happy ending, and thank God for that. (We had seen the True Detective series which ended with almost everyone dying!)
The Physician ends with Rob, his loved one, and some Jewish physicians back in England where they have opened a hospital and medical school.
I enjoyed the film and will probably read the novel on which this movie was based. Mind you The Physician isn't a great film, but it's a good one, say a B or B+. Some critics complained that the movie is historically inaccurate, but nothing pulled me away from the "fictive dream." (Some people may need to understand what "fiction" and "poetic license"mean to understand the historical discrepancies in the film.)
Read also
Review A Bottle in the Gaza Sea
Review Mr. Turner
Tags: movies, movie, review,entertainment, #thephysician, The Physician, film
Ths is all for now,
Cecilia
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