A Mistake

by Mike McGranaghan

A Mistake is a challenging film to form a strong opinion about. It raises provocative issues, only to resolve them in a contrived manner. It deals with timely subject matter but is so downbeat that you may not want to subject yourself to 101 minutes of sadness. Elizabeth Banks gives a powerfully emotional performance while speaking in a distracting and unconvincing Aussie accent. You see what I mean?

Banks plays Dr. Liz Taylor. During the opening scene, she’s performing surgery on a young woman with severe sepsis. Taylor allows her student doctor to insert the final trocar. He screws that up, leading to an emergency procedure to stop the subsequent internal bleeding. The patient later dies. When the woman’s parents start questioning whether there was negligence, Taylor finds herself becoming a pariah in the hospital. The chief of surgery (Simon McBurney) gets on her case, and her nurse girlfriend (Mickey Sumner) becomes distant.

The question at the heart of A Mistake is: Was Dr. Taylor responsible for the fatality? Writer/director Christine Jeffs (Sunshine Cleaning) does a fairly effective job of getting you to explore that from multiple angles. Having a student doctor insert the trocar might not have been the best idea, but how does one learn otherwise? Taylor swiftly took action to correct the damage; as the surgeon, though, she’s responsible for every decision made in the operating room, and a different decision might have avoided the crisis. That’s the kind of stuff you ponder while watching the movie.

It's gripping – if also depressing – until the third act. That’s the point at which the movie cops out on the issues it raises. We consequently get the hackneyed climactic scene where Taylor gives an impromptu confessional speech before a group of colleagues and reporters. We’re even treated to someone doing a variation of the “slow clap” afterward. The screenplay additionally seems a bit too concerned with absolving Taylor, a trait that sucks the air out of the central dilemma.

Despite the terrible accent, Banks is very good in the lead role. McBurney does outstanding supportive work as Taylor’s foil. As good as they are, they can’t prevent A Mistake from painting itself into a corner. Rather than fully embracing the scenario’s inherent moral ambiguity, the movie’s finale attempts to provide some semblance of a resolution, and that is just what the title says.

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