SWEET & SOUR : 'John Q.' & 'Storytelling'.

Politicians take note: if box office figures reveal what America has on its mind, then it seems we're thinking health care. The hugely successful John Q. stars Denzel Washington as a factory worker whose young son is stricken in the middle of a Little League game. The boy has a congenital heart defect, it turns out, and will die without a transplant; but Washington, who along with his wife, is barely making ends meet, has been shifted to an inferior HMO plan that covers him only up to $25,000. The transplant costs three times that, and we watch as his indignant cry of "But I'm covered!" goes unanswered, and his faith in the system collapses.

It's not hard to imagine a searingly real portrait of a family facing such a plight. But what director Nick Cassevettes has in mind is public policy wrapped in melodrama. After exhausting all legal channels--filing insurance appeals, begging the hospital and its smooth-talking heart surgeon (James Woods) to do the transplant for payment later--Washington's character resorts to righteous violence, marching in with a gun and taking an ER full of people captive. He'll kill them all, he warns, unless his son is given a heart. All wildly implausible, sure, but that's beside the point. The point is the statement itself, the symbolism of the angry gesture. Washington's character is like the one Michael Douglas played in Falling Down, except that he's rampaging for justice. When he waves his gun and shouts, "the hospital's under new management now--free health care for everyone!" the audience erupts in raucous applause.

Director Cassavettes is the son of the late actor/director John Cassavettes, whose quirky, darkly humorous movies about deadbeat jazz musicians and mobster molls on the lam (he also directed the raw psychodrama of A Woman under the Influence) couldn't be farther from the moral cheerleading of John Q. The film returns us to the It's a Wonderful Life days when Hollywood not only stood up for the Little Man, but reviled the Big Men, too--those weasel-eyed bankers in their cravats. Never underestimate the class significance of neckties. In one scene in a hospital hallway, Washington looks on as a wealthy patient--one who has had his heart surgery and is robustly recovering--jokes with the surgeon (about tennis!); the camera zeroes in on his wife's glittering jewelery, and then on...his ascot! I think the last ascot I saw was on Barry Fitzgerald in And Then There Were None. But never mind. In a morality play, every last curlicue of virtue and villainy should be in place. And so in John Q. we get ascots, and we get Anne Heche as the ice-blooded administrator who scans the family finances ("Lets see...You don't own your home, you have no stocks, you have $1,000 in savings..."), then demands a $75,000 downpayment--in cash. Class insults are delivered mockingly, with barely concealed pleasure.

On the other side of the moral ledger is Washington's gritty little family, an outfit so gosh-darn squeaky clean, Mom and Dad lovingly scold Junior for using the expression "kick someone's butt." Their working-class church and Little League gatherings are depicted as havens of racial harmony. Against the rapacity of the rich, Cassavettes places the generosity of the common folk--collecting hard-earned dollars to cover the family's hospital bills, as Stevie Wonder sings "Someday there's gotta be, somebody who can hear my plea." Meanwhile, Washington stands in endless lines, is dissed by uncaring bureaucrats. Desperation mounts. He pawns his wedding ring--and we cut back to the blood pressure machine at his son's bedside, ticking another ominous notch lower. "Do something, John!" his wife beseeches. The film plays to our outrage; you want to grab the nearest surgeon and strangle him with his ascot.

Denzel Washington is a leading man whose near-perfect good looks can distract you from his gifts as an actor. In all his roles he exudes a combination of intelligence and quiet intensity equalled, among American actors, only by Gene Hackman. John Q. deals out stock characters designed for us to know everything about them before they say two lines--the worst is Robert Duvall as a tough police detective with a heart of gold--and yet here is Washington, weeping at his son's bedside, emoting like mad. It's almost grotesque to see solid acting in the midst of such flimsy stuff. Once Washington's character makes his bold move, the film heats up into a progressive fantasy so farfetched and glorious, it might have been plotted by the editorial board of the Nation. Even Washington's own hostages rally to his cause (surprise! the gun turns out not to be loaded), and the ER becomes a seminar on the evils of HMOs and the surgeon's villainy ("more like the Hypocritic oath, doc," says one radicalized orderly). Outside, the crowd gathering to watch the crisis grows ever louder, and we realize they're not simply rubbernecking--they're angry! John Q. is not just a man, but Everyman, and these are not just people, but The People, jeering at the police, lecturing a Stone Phillips-like TV journalist about "the haves and have-nots" in American life. "John Q.--very good man!" shouts one elderly Asian man. Everyone is in on the fun.

Silly as the movie is, maybe its existence is a hopeful sign--politically, if not cinematically. You have to go back to the early eighties or beyond, to films like Country or Norma Rae, to find this kind of progressive populism in a mainstream Hollywood release. Conservative complaints notwithstanding, for twenty years the political demagoguery onscreen has come mostly from the right, stoking populist animus against urban crime, craven liberal bureaucrats, foreigners, Vietnam-era malaise. Maybe we're swinging back the other way, back to the Hollywood liberalism of yore, the Stanley Krameresque message movies. (Interestingly, the week's other current top box-office hit, We Were Soldiers, could have been the right-wing counterpart to John Q., but turns out to be a horrors-of-battle movie that eschews politics and has been praised for showing respect for the North Vietnamese soldier.) "You can't hate this movie," my friend said as we left the theater. "It's nice to see the lefties making noise for once." Maybe. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for another Hollywood tradition, a deathwatch graced by an angelic kid's big smile.

From the Critical Devastation Department: If too much uplift is getting you down, check out Todd Solondz's Storytelling. The New York Times's eminent Janet Maslin called his first film, Welcome to the Dollhouse, "mordantly hilarious,"and his next, Happiness (which featured a controversial portrayal of a child molestor), a "murderous comedy of manners." Now Solondz has jettisoned the hilarity, the comedy, and the manners, leaving only the murderousness. His new work reveals a filmmaker sinking in his own misanthropy.

Storytelling divides into two thematically linked episodes. One, titled "Nonfiction," follows a hapless would-be filmmaker, Toby, making a documentary on the life of an equally hapless high school student. The other, "Fiction," satirizes a bad college creative writing class, which is exactly what Storytelling itself drearily brings to mind. Like a bad college writer, Solondz gives us arguments about a story instead of an actual story, makes callow points about the meaning of meaning, and indulges pointless ironies--now riffing on a well-known image from American Beauty, now placing a big red rectangle over a sex scene as a protest against ratings and censorship. Whoa, dude, radical!

Solondz's dubious instinct is to find taboo subjects and dig into them as provocatively as he can. His idea of "transgressive" moviemaking is to staple together a compendium of sick jokes on handicapped people, the Holocaust, and race relations, and dare us to think he means it. His camera seeks out close-ups of his characters caught in twitching studies of failure, cowardice, arrogance, anxiety, and cruelty. And then, just in case you're beginning to suspect his intentions, he warns you off. "I like my people," Toby, the filmmaker, insists when his producer accuses him of condescension. Maybe a director as brilliantly self-conscious as Woody Allen can get away with that kind of thing. But Solondz? A telltale whiff of self-pity, mixed with panic, floats off Storytelling. It smacks of a desperate attempt to preempt criticism. When a director is this intent on arguing with you, it usually means he has lost the argument with himself.