‘First Wave’ a firsthand account of pandemic
HOT SPRINGS — Matthew Heineman’s “The First Wave” didn’t get into the Sundance Film Festival. It was also rejected by Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and the New York Film Festival. It finally had its world premiere at the Hamptons International Film Festival earlier this month.
After watching it at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, I can understand why. And the bigtime festivals’ reluctance to show the film has nothing to do with the quality of Heineman’s work. Like the 38-year-old filmmaker’s Oscar-nominated “Cartel Land” from 2015, “The First Wave” will be one of the year’s most-talked about docs and seems certain to end up on a lot of year-end Top 10 lists. As I’m writing this, I’m still processing it but I can say for certain that it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.
And it is absolutely devastating. It hurts. It will make you grieve. It will exhaust you. It will flat tear you up. It will make you angry.
It’s not exactly a pleasant experience. I can understand why it might be an easy pass for some people. And for some festival directors.
So good on Hot Springs for programming it. Now if we can just get the people who need to see it to see it.
“The First Wave” is a heart-pounding and graphic verite snapshot of the early days of the covid-19 crisis, focused through the lens of a single hospital, the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York, between March and June 2020. Somehow Heineman acquired miraculous access to the doctors, nurses, patients and spaces of LIJMC, so much that I worried that the film crews might actually impede the health care workers they were filming. While one might question a few of Heineman’s choices — we watch at least two patients die on camera despite the frantic work of the hospital staff and there’s one instance where we might be led to believe that a doctor is discussing a different patient than she in fact is — the overall sense is of a rapidly filled notebook, history drafted from immediate experience.
In a sense it’s like the Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Afghan war battle film “Restrepo” — “The First Wave” puts us right on the front lines, where no one has the luxury of philosophical consideration. It’s all reaction and response, as an overwhelmed squad fights back against an invisible, inscrutable enemy.
One of the key characters in the film is Dr. Nathalie Douge, an internist who is struck by the way the new virus seems to disproportionately affect Black, Hispanic and immigrant populations.
“It went from three to ‘all’,” she says early on, describing how
covid-19 went from a rumor to a tsunami, flooding the hospital with patients and driving her and her colleague to work punishing long hours. As the deadly parameters of the disease begin to be discovered, she’s torn by her natural compassion and the need to keep a safe distance from the infected to avoid coming down with the virus herself. As the months move on, Douge throws herself into political activism in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police: She has indentified racism as yet another public health crisis.
Then there’s the deeply empathetic critical care nurse Kellie Wunsch, who volunteers on the hospital’s critical response team, who invests so much in her patients’ fortunes that we worry she might snap. She admits she desperately needs for a critically ill patient to pull through — she has seen so many patients seem to recover before crashing — to restore her hope.
Then there’s physical therapist Karl Arabian, a jocular vocal ringer for the actor John Leguizamo who laughs and jokes with patients as he begins to teach them how to stand and move again.
On the other side, Heineman focuses mainly on two patients, Brussels Jabon and Ahmed Ellis, both of whom are close to death when we first encounter them. Jabon, a nurse, gave birth in the first days of the pandemic, and her infant daughter remains in the hospital nursery while her husband, also a health care worker, and extended family — many of whom are also suffering from the virus — are quarantined at home.
Ellis an NYPD school safety officer, is a father of two; his wife, Alexis — also a health care worker who daily puts herself at risk — and kids see him only via an iPad held by a hospital staffer. But for most of the movie Ellis is too weak and sick to do anything more than feebly nod or lift a finger to acknowledge them.
Heineman’s film plays like an embedded reporter’s video notepad, and we have the advantage of knowing how (some) things played out. For instance, we know the film ends on a prematurely positive note. And it’s been reported that he edited out footage of interviews he conducted with then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo after Cuomo’s resignation in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, but the governor still appears in archival footage, issuing tough love edicts and inspiring needed hope. But human weaknesses don’t necessarily keep a person from rising to a crisis.
From a purely logistical standpoint, one wonders at how close the filmmakers got to the health care workers, and how some of this amazing footage was acquired. There’s a drone shot of police fighting with protesters during a riot that looks like it was staged for a Scorsese movie. One wonders if some of the extreme close-up work was actually shot by one of the film’s subjects on one of the ubiquitous digital devices that pop up in nearly every scene. When an overwrought and exhausted Douge begins to break down, cursing and crying, she’s hustled away from the camera by a colleague.
Thankfully, the camera does not follow, but it does hold its gaze. It witnesses.
It stands proxy for us, who didn’t have to see the tractor-trailer morgues and had the luxury of denying the dread, potency or even the existence of the disease. “The First Wave” isn’t an easy watch, but it’s a necessary one. Too bad it will never run on certain channels, the ones that cater to the wishfulness of covid deniers.