Trust Me, I’m a Doctor approaches Anna Nicole Smith through a man who had good reason to worry about how the story of her death would be told. Sandeep Kapoor, played by Kal Penn, was her physician and became a defendant in the criminal case that followed. The film draws on his memoir, which supplies a close view of the exposure that comes with an investigation. It also gives Thane Economou a difficult decision about how far to trust the account. The most productive version of the movie would be one in which sympathy for Kapoor made it possible to ask harder questions about his proximity to a celebrity patient.
Penn has the right tools for that ambiguity. He can convey competence without closing off the possibility that a doctor enjoys being asked for things only he can provide. The film catches some of that uneasiness when what would ordinarily stay in an office or a private notebook becomes public property. The paparazzi gathering around his workplace are a particularly clear measure of the change. For years his relationship with a famous patient gave him a place inside a story other people wanted. Suddenly it supplies the reason they think they are entitled to walk into his.
Linda Hamilton, as Kapoor’s lawyer Ellyn Garofalo, brings an instructive candor to the question of what a jury will believe. Her advice makes the performance of good character part of the defense. Penn has a useful choice in how to receive that information. A man may want to be understood as a competent physician and feel distinctly uncomfortable when the person defending him describes competence as something he has to make legible to strangers. Hamilton gives that discrepancy a sharpness the rest of the legal drama could use.
Abbie Cornish has the less forgiving assignment. Smith comes into the film with a voice and physical presence audiences are likely to recognize, and every effort to evoke them threatens to do the work of the tabloid images the movie has reason to question. Cornish can suggest someone deciding whether to make a situation easier by giving people the performance they expect. Those moments are worth more than affectionate signals that the film knows she was a person. Smith needs time in which her judgment can alter a scene, including occasions when her judgment contradicts the view of the man whose memoir provides the framework.
Economou’s interest in the spectacle of early-2000s coverage creates a tonal problem. There is something grotesquely funny in the scramble to turn private relationships into televised certainty. The script’s more self-consciously cheeky touches can make the spectacle easier to consume without bringing it under any greater scrutiny. An audience can be invited to recognize the era’s cruelty and still spend most of the film waiting for the famous patient to produce the next burst of color in the physician’s story.
The footage of the actors at a Pride celebration gives a sense of a different film the material might have held. Publicity and companionship occupy the same space. Somebody can choose to share an event with a friend while spending a great deal of energy fulfilling other people’s expectations of celebrity. Kapoor’s interest in protecting his private identity and Smith’s ease in a public performance could have made a complicated friendship in that setting. It would require time to notice who gets to leave the public role behind and whose movements will keep being interpreted after the event is over.
The distinction between a legal defense and a drama becomes sharper as Kapoor fights for his reputation. An allegation has to meet a particular standard before a court can hold somebody responsible for it. A drama can continue to ask what it meant for people in a room to trust one another after the legal facts have been arranged. Penn is capable of sustaining the discomfort of a man in that position. The storytelling is too eager to restore the stability that would make him easy to root for.
There is a worthwhile movie here about the cost of a medical relationship acquiring an audience. The reputations of patient and physician are both exposed, but they are exposed in different ways and to different degrees. Penn and Cornish offer glimpses of what it would mean to follow those two vulnerabilities as carefully as the legal case. The film’s center of gravity stays with the person who got to write the book.
