Kids with cancer steal - and wrench - hearts

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, June 2, 2006

I can't distill any simple lessons from A Lion in the House, a four-hour documentary about children with cancer. I also can't say this completely wrenching movie exemplifies great or groundbreaking technique in the art of nonfiction filmmaking.

I'm not even sure that everyone should see A Lion in the House, which opens today at the Starz FilmCenter and plays later this month on PBS. The movie requires an enormous commitment of time and emotional energy. I didn't want to see it, either; I had to force myself.

Moreover, almost everything I'm going to say about the film may sound more like a discouragement than an inducement to attend. But I'm recommending the movie because it must be regarded as an extraordinary expression of will, endurance and fortitude.

The husband-and-wife team of Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert spent six years making A Lion in the House. They can hardly be accused of exploiting a highly emotional subject. As the parents of a teenage cancer survivor, they have instant credibility.

Even more important, the filmmakers found a variety of young people and parents who agreed to put their lives on display. It may sound corny, but I felt an obligation to bear witness here, and as I watched, I couldn't help but be awed by the capacity of ordinary people to deal with horrible problems.

The documentary that A Lion in the House most resembles is Frederick Wiseman's indispensable Near Death, a six-hour look at end-of-life decisions at a Boston hospital. But where Wiseman's film raised enormously difficult emotional and ethical issues, Lion mostly chronicles the grind faced by young cancer patients and their families: the chemo, the experimental drugs, the devastating side effects, the flashes of hope and debilitating setbacks.

Questions arise about when treatment should end, but the film's children tend to take over.

Tim Woods enters the film when he's 16 and grappling with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He has so much personality and spunk that it's almost impossible to believe he won't buck the odds. He's rebellious and, at times, cranky, but he's a good kid with a big heart.

It's necessary to know that although 75 percent of children who contract cancer survive, the film doesn't tell a feel-good story about the triumph over disease. You will see death up close and, by the time it arrives, very personally.

Inevitably, these youngsters begin to steal hearts, which makes watching them die all the more difficult. Intimately filmed medical procedures provide a glimpse of their physical pain, but nothing rivals the film's gathering sense of heartbreak.

In addition to the irrepressible Woods, the movie focuses on Alex Lougheed, an adorable girl of 7. She has leukemia. We also meet Justin Ashcraft, a 19-year-old who also has leukemia and has been battling the disease for 10 years, sometimes having his story told in "inspirational" newspaper yarns.

The directors also expose us to the families of these children, their doctors, nurses and siblings. Lion gradually assembles a portrait of lives under enormous stress.

Much of the filming took place at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which means the filmmakers are able to include perspectives about the limits faced by doctors who practice pediatric oncology, a specialty that wouldn't even exist in a more just world.

A Lion in the House weighs on you; watching it becomes an increasingly heavy experience, and I mean that literally. Watching it requires a willingness to experience a tiny bit of the pain, resignation and hope against hope faced by those who lived these stories.

If we magnify what we feel by a million, maybe we can begin to understand the amazing weight that some among us carry.