Awake
November 30, 2007, the final year of cinema week 48
I swear I’m not doing this on purpose.
A quick look behind the curtain: every week I look at a spreadsheet of the film releases of 2007 (sorted by release date) and find the films whose anniversary is approaching. I then take note of what’s the most culturally relevant film of that week, watch it, and start outlining an essay. This week, it was The Savages. Then as time permits I’ll watch another movie or two from the same release weekend to see if I can’t write a paragraph long blurb about it. I rarely have any notion of what these other movies even are. They’re just titles on a spreadsheet with a release date, a director, screenwriter, and a few top billed actors in the cells. Most of the time I watch them, they’re fine, and I write a paragraph on it and move on with my life. Today was different. Today I watched a film that deserves its place in the good-bad-movie canon alongside Plan 9 From Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate. Today I saw Awake. Apologies to The Savages, you’re a very good movie, but I cannot not talk about Awake.
Awake is a film about an investment banker named Clay (Hayden Christiensen) who lives a charmed life. He has a good job, has a good relationship with his mother Lilith (Lena Olin), and a beautiful fiance named Sam Lockwood (Jessica Alba). His one problem is that his heart is failing and he needs a transplant. Good thing his bestie, Dr. Jack Harper (Terrence Howard) is a heart surgeon… or is it????
The plot of Awake is nuts — and I’ll get to the intensely weird plot in a moment — but it’s also important to note that the overall atmosphere of the film feels like someone who heard about humans one time from a friend who listened to a podcast about them but has never experienced them firsthand. After a cold open the film’s action starts with Clay taking a bath. His fiance Sam comes in and they proceed to make out and presumably have sex. She then drives him to his mother’s house where he has breakfast with her before going fishing with Dr. Jack and then going into the office. Clay and Sam are wearing heavy coats and later in the film they attend a Halloween party, suggesting that this morning took place in late October. Sunlight permeates all of these locations. Sunrise in New York in late October hits around 7:00 AM. Even if Clay drew his bath in the darkness and got in right as dawn broke, with the driving from Brooklyn to Manhattan to his East River fishing spot that leaves an hour tops to take a bath, have sex, get dressed, and eat breakfast, and go fishing. Personally I find it difficult to do the Wordle and drink a cup of coffee before I get to work. I can’t imagine how frantic it feels to take a full bath and fuck and have a full sit down breakfast with mother and fish while getting ready to face the day. Every scene is sufficed with this energy, like someone knows vaguely what a romantic relationship and a job and medicine are, but has never actually experienced them firsthand and so everything seems off.
The setup of Awake seems simple enough. Clay needs a new heart, he loves Sam, but his mother disapproves of her, causing him to keep his engagement from her. There’s medical drama and also personal drama. Everything you’d expect from an episode of House M.D. or something. Things get a little weird when Clay’s mother insists that Clay switch his primary care physician to her bestie, Dr. Jonathan Neyer, a man who is allegedly on track to become surgeon general of the United States. Things get weirder when he refuses. Things get weirdest when Clay actually goes under the knife.
When Clay’s replacement heart comes in, it turns out that he’s one of the 0.1% of people who experience anesthesia awareness during surgery. This is where the title of the film comes from and doubtless the central idea of the film. Clearly a screenwriter or producer read an article in New York Magazine or something about anaesthesia awareness and thought “there’s a movie to be made here” and started writing and/or hiring a writer. Unfortunately if you think about how you would craft a story around anaesthesia awareness for even five minutes you realize that there’s not much there to hang a conflict on. The natural train track of a story based on anaesthesia awareness would have Clay have a really bad time during the surgery, he would be mad at his bestie the heart surgeon that let it happen, and then process that trauma later. That is not a quality medical thriller. In order to make a quality medical thriller we need to take that story train and take it off the rails, which — as Ozzy Osborne taught us — makes it a crazy train.
Turns out Dr. Jack is swimming in debt from medical malpractice claims1, which I must point out: makes it absolutely bananas that Clay would explicitly choose him to perform his heart surgery when his mom is besties with the best heart surgeon in the nation. His colleagues Dr. Putnam and Nurse Penny Carver are as well. This is why they devised the fool proof scheme to murder Clay while he’s under the knife. Clay is a wealthy investment banker with no heirs, so with his $10 million in assets they can recover from their debts and go into private practice and have an easy life. Unfortunately for them, two things get in their way. First there’s a substitute anesthesiologist in the surgery named Dr. Larry Lupin from whom they need to hide their plot, and second, Clay is fully aware of his surroundings, so when Dr. Larry Lupin takes a break from surgery2 and they start discussing the plot, he can hear everything and knows what they’re up to.
Now, you might be thinking what I thought: how on earth would Dr. Jack and his crooked medical colleagues get Clay’s $10 million after he dies? Turns out there’s a second wrinkle to the plot. His fiancé Sam is also a medical professional working at the same hospital who is also drowning in medical debt. She was sent explicitly as a honeypot to woo and wed Clay so that she would be the beneficiary to his estate when the doctors murdered him. So, to recap, the plot is:
Dr. Jack is besties with an investment banker named Clay. He is drowning in debt and secretly craves Clay’s money.
Clay has a heart attack while in his 20s, Dr. Jack then uses this to his advantage and diagnoses him with a bum ticker and tells him he needs to get on a transplant list, and that he will perform the transplant surgery.
He then enlists the help of three other medical professionals — which I must point out here, is a profession people get into because they want to save lives — to say “hey will you help me murder my friend so we can take his money”?
One of them quits her nursing job to to go work for Clay’s mother with the explicit aim of making him fall in love with her so that he’ll marry her and thus be his beneficiary, all the while without any of the other few hundred workers at the hospital where Clay needs to go regularly ever recognizing her.
Unfortunately for Clay, he cannot do anything about the plot because the anesthesia drugs have rendered him temporarily paralyzed. Unfortunately for Dr. Lupin he’s a sloppy drunk and thus it takes him too long to realize what’s happening, and when he does, people don’t believe him (see: sloppy drunk). Thus Clay’s transplant fails, and he dies on the O.R. table… OR does he???
What Dr. Jack could not have foreseen was the incredibly clever detective skills of his mother, who deduces that Clay’s brand new bride is secretly a hospital employee. How does she know? Because she knows how to operate the vending machine, that’s how. From this she deduces somehow that there’s a murder plot to kill her son. Does she use this knowledge to criminally prosecute the conspirators? Heavens no. She overdoses on pills, makes sure the organ donor checkmark is checked on her driver’s license, and calls her bestie the greatest heart surgeon in the nation so that he can rush to the hospital and cut her heart out of her chest and give it to her son. Normal. Once again, I must point out that she decides on a course of action that will end her life because her new daughter-in-law was suspiciously good at operating a vending machine.
Now, what you may suspect is that this results in a bittersweet ending where Clay is alive, but mourns the loss of his bestie, his fiance, and most especially his mother. This is not the case, because while under anesthetic he also recovers a memory where his mother murdered his father, a memory that he blocked out because it was too painful to recall. So I guess he’s fine losing all these people because each of them are murderers and it’s good that they’re dead or in jail. Yaaaay.
Once again, apologies to The Savages. You’re a much better movie, but I had a duty to inform however many people I can of the wackadoo nature of the plot of Awake. It simply grabbed ahold of me and couldn’t let go.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ Not a good movie. Beyond the absoludicrous plot and bad script, the leads of the film are all movie-star shaped people who cannot convincingly stand in a room. Their acting is so bad. I sincerely hope none of them namesearch. That said, this is absolutely a movie you want to watch with friends while high. Classic good-bad movie material right here. Also, bonus, it’s only 75 minutes long so you’ll have plenty of time to laugh at it and discuss it after.
Economics: Awake debuted at number 5 at the box office on November 30, 2007, behind the video game adaptation Hitman and ahead of the Christmas comedy Fred Claus. It would go on to make $33 million at the global box office plus $13.5 million in home video sales against an $8.6 million budget. This garbage made money, likely because of all the people who were super sexually horney for Hayden Christiansen at the time.
Fun cameo: One scene of the film takes place at a Halloween costume party. While there, Clay briefly talks to another guest played by David Harbour dressed as Dracula. In the credits, David Harbour is credited as “Dracula”. I am choosing to believe that David Harbour plays the immortal vampire Count Vlad “The Impaler” Dracula who in 2007 would just show up at costume parties on Halloween dressed as himself for funsies.
Other 2007 films visited this week:
The Savages: One of the reasons I didn’t write about this movie primarily is because unequivocally heaping praise on something doesn’t make for interesting writing. I just feel like the Chris Farley Show sketch on SNL when movies like this come around. Remember when Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney — two absolute masters of their craft — delivered tour de force performances as siblings caring for their aging father with a spectacularly written script about the insecurities of being aimless in middle age? That was awesome. ★★★★☆
It is worth noting that around this time there was serious consideration given to government policy that would cap healthcare costs by making it substantially more difficult to sue doctors for malpractice, and in order to manufacture the consent for this, right wing journalists would frame medical settlements as frivolous claims made by greedy patients looking for a payout. “Medical Tort Reform” was a major plank of Senator John McCain’s proposed healthcare policy when he ran for president in 2008.
not a thing
> Thus Clay’s transplant fails, and he dies on the O.R. table… OR does he???
Missed opportunity to say "O.R. does he?!?!?"