As drama, 'Proof' is anemic

"Living Proof" is a new Lifetime TV docudrama about Dr. Dennis Slamon and the development of the drug Herceptin, which has had great success in extending the lives of women with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. (The film, premiering tonight, arrives during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Lifetime's own Stop Breast Cancer for Life campaign) It can't help being moving at times, because the subject itself is moving, and anyone who has lost someone to disease or battled with the medical establishment will bring those feelings to the film. And there's certainly nothing wrong with celebrating the UCLA physician, who did a great thing (and possibly other great things not recounted here).

But worthiness does not a movie make. "Living Proof" is good only in a moral sense. As a film, it's no more than a piecemeal re-creation -- a collection of scenes, some no longer than a television commercial, that jumble the doctor's story with those of his patients to no real cumulative effect. And although some of these scenes provide individual dramatic moments for a fine cast (and for Lifetime, a big-name one) that includes Harry Connick Jr., Bernadette Peters, Regina King, Angie Harmon, Swoosie Kurtz and Amy Madigan, they don't actually constitute a drama.

As Slamon, Connick -- neither chosen for his resemblance to the man he is playing nor made to resemble him -- gets the most to do, though, as with his costars, what he gets is not quite enough to constitute a character. For most of the movie, Slamon is either battling with drug companies or the Food and Drug Administration, delivering bad or good news to his patients or half-apologizing to his neglected but supportive wife (Paula Cale Lisbe). (He commits the classic busy-dad sin: He misses a recital.) "You're going to go to sleep," his wife tells him at one low point, "and you're going to wake up and you're going to fight your fight until you win. That's who you are." And that's that.

He also runs, actually and metaphorically. He runs at the beginning of the film. At the close, he runs before a stadium full of women -- the ones we've met in the movie (including those who've died in its course) and all the anonymous symbolic others who have profited or may profit from his research -- a reference, perhaps, to his statement that Herceptin could save "40,000 lives a year: that's enough to fill the Rose Bowl every other year."