You Don’t Know Jack, reviews

Enthusiastic reaction from most of the country’s top TV critics for tonight’s broadcast of HBO’s You Don’t Know Jack, with a level of praise that translates into top contender status for Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon and director Barry Levinson in this year’s Emmy race. The Baltimore Sun begins its review by summing precisely up how television films and miniseries fill a narrative niche that feature films often neglect:

“You Don’t Know Jack,” a new HBO film about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, aka “Dr. Death,” boasts a cast with two Academy Award recipients and an Oscar-winning director. It had so much advance buzz that one of those stars, Al Pacino, was featured in a profile on “60 Minutes” that drew an audience of 11 million viewers last Sunday. Overall, no feature film in the last six months has enjoyed more launch-week publicity.

And yet, the director, Baltimore-born Barry Levinson, says he doesn’t think he could make a movie like “You Don’t Know Jack” for theatrical release anymore.

“Here’s the reality of it, because we’re talking about a changing landscape in terms of what theatrical is and what supposedly television does,’ Levinson said in an interview last week. “I mean, theatrical would never make this movie. ‚Ķ Theatrically, they don’t want to do movies about people any more. ‚Ķ So, HBO has taken over a certain area that theatricals have abandoned completely.”

Variety says, “Jack is simply to die for.”

A perfect marriage of character and star, “You Don’t Know Jack” is a marvelous fact-based account of an engrossing story, creatively gorged with an embarrassment of riches. Al Pacino disappears into a remarkable sound- and look-alike performance as Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the so-called “Dr. Death” who transformed medically assisted suicide into an all-consuming crusade.

It’s Pacino, however, who grabs our attention from the first frame and never lets go, capturing the strange cadence in Kevorkian’s voice and his irritating personality — rendering him, as more than one person suggests, perhaps the wrong spokesman for a righteous cause. Seeing the actor cut loose when Kevorkian foolishly seeks to defend himself in court can’t help but evoke memories of “And Justice for All ‚Ķ ” — although in this case, it’s the defendant who’s out of order.

Impeccably shot and accompanied by a fine Marcelo Zarvos score, “Jack” is precisely the kind of movie that only HBO, at this point, seems interested in doing: The channel’s longform occupies a realm that embraces movie stars, serious subject matter and big historical material — from Winston Churchill to the 2000 election recount — where feature distributors fear to tread, and basic cablers Hallmark and Lifetime can’t afford to go.

The New York Post:

It’s tough to know which aspect of HBO’s terrific biopic, “You Don’t Know Jack,” is the most intriguing.

Is it the fact that such a strange, asocial man as retired pathologist Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian would catapult to national fame?

Or is it that the actor who plays him, Al Pacino, actually refrained from being a giant slab of ham long enough to revert to the great actor he used to be?

…In this film — at last! — he inhabits the psyche and body of Kevorkian so completely that you will forget that it is Pacino you’re watching and not the strange old doc himself. He’s that good

The New York Times:

A credible biography of Dr. Kevorkian has to focus on the self-serving zealotry beneath the martyr’s guise, but Mr. Pacino has a subversive gift for tapping into the endearing underside of the most despicable villains.

So it is a credit to Mr. Pacino that while he burrows deep into the role, he never lets Dr. Kevorkian’s crackpot charm overtake the character’s egomaniacal drive. Susan Sarandon, plain and bespectacled, is just as agile as Janet Good, a local Hemlock Society leader who made common cause with Dr. Kevorkian — despite his lack of social graces. And it is a credit to the filmmakers that a movie dedicated to a fearless, stubborn man’s campaign against the medical establishment and the criminal justice system doesn’t overly romanticize his struggle or exonerate him from blame.

TIME:

…Saturday’s You Don’t Know Jack, a life of Jack Kevorkian‚Äîlike its recent Temple Grandin biopic‚Äîhit the sweet spot for me, filling in the story of someone I knew better as a headline than as a person. And director Barry Levinson gets a restrained, thoughtful performance out of Pacino… Pacino give the character a modulated read as the cranky, impatient old man who can’t understand why the rest of society doesn’t have the empathy to embrace his work, the logic to see that it’s medically legitimate, or the foresight to recognize him as a great man…

It’s hard for a movie to get so close to a subject without seeming to advocate his views, but You Don’t Know Jack does a solid job of complicating the picture, making it hard to easily dismiss Kevorkian’s arguments or ignore the enormous ramifications of allowing the deliberate end of life. You Don’t Know Jack may be a film about the case for making dying patients comfortable. But admirably, it recognizes that thinking about this, or watching, should be discomfiting.

TV Guide:

Al Pacino is uncanny, as you’d expect, in his ability to get under the skin of this fussy and prickly larger-than-life character. (For our feature story on the movie, go here.) He’s exasperating but electrifying as he revels in the media spotlight over his method of physician-assisted suicide, then plays the persecuted martyr when the publicity erupts into political and court battles.

Without sanitizing the process or whitewashing the debate, and with terrific support from Susan Sarandon, John Goodman and especially Brenda Vaccaro as his long-suffering sister, Jack is a crackling character study of a crank with a cause.

You Don’t Know Jack premieres tonight, Saturday April 24th, at 9/8c on HBO.