Powerful 'Lion' unflinchingly looks at young cancer patients

June 02, 2006|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

There are some places the human heart just doesn't want to go, and a four-hour documentary about children with cancer is one of them. But there are also experiences that leave a viewer with a profoundly enriched awareness of life's fragility and our own unexpected strength, and ``A Lion in the House" is one of those, too. A heart - render and a hankie-drencher, it's a film of quiet, almost incalculable power.

Screening in two parts at the Brattle today and tomorrow -- it also airs as part of PBS's ``Independent Lens" series June 18-19 -- ``Lion" is the product of eight years of work by filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, who were approached in 1997 by Dr. Robert Arceci, then head of the oncology department at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center. Unknown to the doctor, the married documentarians had just come through their own cancer scare with their young daughter; not surprisingly, the directorial sensitivities are spread pretty evenly around.

``A Lion in the House" -- the title comes from Isak Dinesen -- focuses on a handful of patients undergoing treatment at the hospital's Cancer Center, more commonly referred to by staff and families as ``5-A." The first half of the film introduces us to three kids who've already been through at least one round of chemotherapy and remission: 19-year-old Justin Ashcraft, who's been fighting leukemia for a decade; Alex Lougheed, a prankish 7-year-old girl also with leukemia; and Tim Wood, a 15-year-old with Hodgkins lymphoma. In the second half, we meet 6-year-old Jen and 11-year-old Al, both just starting their battles with cancer.

Some of these children will be healthy at the end of ``Lion" and others will have died; the film crosses its fingers and watches. Justin and Alex have the eerie stoicism of war veterans, but Tim, an inner-city African - American, is another story: When he meet him, he's in denial about his physical state, flushing his meds down the toilet and ignoring his oncologist's warnings to gain weight. One of the most compelling narrative threads here is watching Tim take on gravitas over the long haul; by the second half of the film, he's making lucid decisions about his treatment and holding out hope that he might someday become a doctor, too. His disease matures him even as it wastes him.