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What will “Last Cab to Darwin” tell us about euthanasia?

Jul 30, 2015

By Dave Andrusko

lastcab   Haven’t watched a gabillion “road” pictures, from “Road to Bali” to “The Road Warrior,” I can see why the genre would “fit” a “warm-hearted drama” about euthanasia. Even more so since “Last Cab to Darwin [Australia]” is a adapted from a play based on a true story of a cab driver (Max Bell) who drove from the middle of nowhere (Broken Hill) to Darwin to be euthanized.

I have not seen the film, only some reviews and the trailer. Here are a few thoughts.

As I understand it, Mr. Bell was unsuccessful. Depending on who you read, even though euthanasia was technically legal, doctors were concerned they would be prosecuted. So, if the play and now movie is faithful to the book, Mr. Bell (“Rex McRae,” played by Michael Caton in the movie) will not be euthanized. But, of course, what counts is how the decision to kill oneself, albeit with “assistance,” is presented.

The plot, it seems, is straightforward enough. McRae is a simple man, a man of routine, a cab driver who has never left his home town. He discovers he has stomach cancer and is told (according to the plot summaries I read) three months to live. “[H]e responds with a line about how he doesn’t want no hospitals and will keep driving his taxi until the day he dies,” writes Luke Buckmaster.

But he hears that an euthanasia advocate, Dr. Farmer (played by Jacki Weaver), “has developed a new machine that administers death literally at the press of a button.” This is, of course, a takeoff on “Dr. Death”–Jack Kevorkian–but more specifically on Australia’s own Dr. Death, Philip Nitschke.

“He interrupts a radio interview [Dr. Farmer’s] conducting to tell her he’s on his way,” the Hollywood Reporter’s Harry Windsor tells us.” She tells him to keep his fluids up, so Rex buys a six-pack and sets off.”

So off he goes, headed for Darwin.

Like all road pictures McRae runs into what Australians call “randoms”–young drifters, trying to figure out where their lives, which have just begun, are headed. In a word what their purpose is.

The trailers and the reviews do not–as they shouldn’t–tell us how the movie ends. But the Dr. Farmer character is no Dr. Welby and there are lots of hints that even as Rex tools his way towards his intended destination–death–he earns a great deal about living.

And the film is constructed in such a way, Windsor writes, that Rex has an “eleventh-hour realization of who and what really matters.”

That would be a welcome change from the recent movies that make a joke out of assisted suicide at the same time they mock the diminishing intellectual capacities of aging people.

Here’s hoping.

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