John Crowley sat in a room at Denver’s Hotel Teatro talking about Brendan Fraser, the actor who portrays him in the medical drama “Extraordinary Measures.”Fraser, he wanted us to know, “cries a lot more in the movie than I ever did.”
Anyone watching CBS knows about the movie, the first theatrical release of the network’s new CBS Films. The network’s promo spots feature a desperate Fraser, as a desperate parent, and a frothing Harrison Ford, as a research scientist, butting heads but also joining forces to find a cure for a fatal genetic disease.
The film, which opens today, was inspired by Crowley’s dogged effort to find a drug to save his two children, Megan and Patrick, who have Pompe disease. During the movie’s time frame, children diagnosed with Pompe seldom lived beyond age 9.
Crowley and Fraser, who was also in town, are hardly dopplegangers. The medical research exec is dark-haired, wiry. He’s the son of a New Jersey police officer who was killed in the line of duty when he was 7. There’s a fierceness to the former Bristol-Myers Squibb marketing exec who now heads Amicus Therapeutics, a bio-tech company developing drugs for rare genetic diseases.
Fraser is taller, fair-skinned, softer. The actor tends to swing from impressive turns in challenging dramas (“Gods and Monsters,” “Crash”) to leads in rousing or knuckleheaded popcorn fare (“The Mummy” and “Monkey Bone”). Those parts make one forget how serious a performer he can be. In “Extraordinary Measures” he goes toe-to-toe with Ford, who’s full of alpha growl throughout much of the film.
Crowley said what struck him most about Fraser’s portrayal was his deep empathy. Like Crowley, Fraser is the father of three. When the actor hears this later, he bends his head in thought.
“Who wouldn’t do whatever they could for their children who were in jeopardy, except people who are unfit parents for whatever reason,” he said in a hushed voice. “I felt that right away when I read the script. I could really understand that. This happened, this guy really did this. All the moral conundrums, ethics, professional issues he had to navigate bring up many relevant points. What is the value of a human life? Seriously, what’s the bottom line?”
The day Fraser and Crowley were in Denver, wife Aileen Crowley was with her onscreen counterpart, Keri Russell, for the “Rachael Ray Show.” Ford had just been in Chicago.
The cast crisscrossed the country for CBS Films’ maiden release. While not visually cinematic, the movie, directed by British filmmaker Tom Vaughan (“Starter for Ten”) suggests the kind of drama the network once did before ceding most of its turf to police-procedural hits.
The movie and its publicity demands are not the Crowleys’ first exposure to public attention. Back in 2003, they experienced the peculiar vulnerability of being written about when Wall Street Journal reporter Geeta Anand told their story. Later, she expanded the piece into a book, “The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million — and Bucked the Medical Establishment — in a Quest to Save His Children”).
“The article was a month or two of our lives,” said Crowley. The book that followed involved more than 200 hours and took three years, he reckons. “Then you have to adapt that to a screenplay.” (Crowley has written a book too, “Chasing Miracles,” due out in February.)
The two greatest liberties screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs took in sculpting their story into a two-hour film was compressing the time line of the Crowleys’ saga and weaving Ford’s character, Professor Stonehill, out of bits and pieces of the researchers and doctors Crowley dealt with.
Crowley appreciates the choices Ford made in bringing a gifted scientist with zero people skills to the screen.
“He showed the brilliance of the many people I worked with,” he said of Ford, also one of the movie’s producers.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@ . Also on blogs.denverpostcom/ madmoviegoer
