Medicine Men

"Extraordinary Measures" will probably be slapped around for being square and clumsy, but there is also something new and fascinating about it.

Yeah, in terms of style it's a Lifetime movie about one family's fight against a rare disease, but it's the prosaic details of that fight that actually make the movie worthwhile and timely, arriving as the debate over health-care policy seems about to reignite.

"Measures" is the fact-based story of John Crowley (Brendan Fraser), a drug company executive quietly losing his mind because two of his children are succumbing to a rare disease - Pompe - which is degenerative and fatal.

A standard disease-of-the-week yarn shows parents trying to find the right existing treatment, but there is no treatment for Pompe, not even on the cutting edge.

So Crowley makes up his mind to create one. He quits his job, personally contacts the eccentric professor (Harrison Ford) doing the most promising research, raises venture capital to fund his work, and starts his own bio-tech firm from scratch.

Problem solved!

Well, not so fast. Ford's character turns out to be a prickly tyrant, brilliant but impossible to work with. He has no clear idea how to turn his chalkboard theories into drugs - the movie gets into the nitty gritty of drug manufacturing (like the fact that you can't manufacture synthetic enzymes without FDA-certified parts from a dead cow). The process slows, nervous investors back off.

Meanwhile, Crowley's children get sicker. His daughter's heart stops as her muscles weaken, she depends on repeated resuscitation.

He frantically travels the country looking for more backers, for suitable merger partners, trying to preserve and pursue his experimental treatment in radically different corporate cultures.

"Extraordinary Measures" is the only movie I can think of that illuminates the long, complex process of bringing a new drug to market (and all the while reminding us why it's important to do so).

It sheds light on the world of "orphan drugs" - those that treat a tiny pool of rare-disease victims, and need special tax and legal treatment to attract private investment.

It is reasonably faithful to Crowley's true story (laid out in "The Cure" by Geeta Anand), and it gives moviegoers a different take on pharmaceutical companies.

When we see drug companies in movies, they're usually marketing some heinously toxic product or experimenting on third world innocents. They're run by Terrence Stamp, or somebody like him, and employ mostly albino hitmen.

"Extraordinary Measures" is more prosaic, and more informative. It's about the sweaty work in the lab, the less glamorous side of venture capitalism - here, it usually looks like pleading. And we see the good that can come from money chasing after the best idea.

It is also, essentially, the story of enormous energy and hundreds of millions of dollars expended to find a treatment that will benefit only a few desperately sick patients.

"Extraordinary Measures" asks the viewer to consider whether that's a health care failure or a success.