Kevorkian

Depending on your personal views of what he did, Dr. Jack Kevorkian is either a hero or a villain. If you don’t know what he did, this fascinating documentary from director Matthew Galkin does a pretty good job of explaining it all in a fairly balanced way. What makes the movie really work, though, is how it picks up the threads of Kevorkian’s life after he served his time in prison to show us how he spent the last few years of his life, years lived under some pretty rigid court-ordered guidelines. It also takes the time to expand the man’s story to include scenes from his life that have nothing to do with his battle to make assisted suicide accepted, or at least openly talked about, in America. Oddly enough, the scenes of him in the studio recording the ambient music he’s written come across as weirder and more obsessed than anything he did while with a patient, but somehow that humanizes the other aspects of his infamous life.