Movie Review: 'The God Commitee' The Heart is Just a Muscle

“You fail to remember that the heart is just a muscle.”

I have to give Kelsey Grammer credit for being able to deliver that line above without breaking into a giggle fit. The context is that Grammer is portraying a world renowned heart surgeon who is demeaning another heart surgeon for getting too emotionally involved with her patients. Grammer is called upon to deliver lines like this one more than once in the new movie, The God Committee, a deeply flawed and earnest melodrama about a heart transplant.

In The God Committee Kelsey Grammer stars as, and I am not making this up, Dr Andre Boxer. Dr Boxer is a heart surgeon without a heart. He’s cold and uncaring toward his patients. Each patient for Dr Boxer is another step toward his goal of moving into the private sector where his research into growing transplantable organs in animals is a potential breakthrough that could put the transplant lists of the world out of business.

He has a noble goal but he rarely acts like a noble human being and he’s our hero in The God Committee. So, what is The God Committee you ask? It’s a committee made up of hospital decision makers, doctors, a nurse, an administrator, et cetera, who must decide which patients get needed organ transplants. As we join the story, a young man has died in a horrible bike vs car accident that left his heart intact.

Being an organ donor, the young man dies but not before giving up his healthy heart. The heart is intended for one of Dr Boxer’s patients but that patient dies before the heart arrives. Thus, the transplant committee, including Janeane Garofalo as the hospital administrator, Grammer’s Dr Boxer, a nurse played by Patricia R Floyd, the head of psychiatry at the hospital played by Peter Kim, and Dr Jordan Taylor, played by Julia Stiles, the newest member of the committee, must decide which of three patients should get the heart.

Complicating matters is a lawyer/priest, played by Colman Domingo. The lawyer informs the committee that the very rich father of one of the three transplant candidates, played by Dan Hedaya, is going to donate $25 million dollars to the hospital. The rich man claims that the donation will go to the hospital regardless of whether his son gets the heart but the implication is strong that the much needed donation could be ripped away if the decision doesn’t go the rich man’s way.

The God Committee was written and directed by Austin Stark who decides to flash forward and backward in time to tell this story. In 2010 the transplant committee wrestles with their ethical quandary of needing a major financial donation and not wanting to just give the heart to a rich kid for money. In 2020, the story follows Boxer as he struggles with his own heart trouble while trying to make a major breakthrough to make transplant committees irrelevant.

None of what happens is particularly interesting. This is because the movie fails to recognize that Kelsey Grammer is not a most sympathetic hero. Having Grammer’s heartless Dr Boxer argue for the ethical choice of a less than rich patient getting the transplant is at odds with Grammer’s glowering, awkward and pompous performance. I get that it might play as a subversion of expectations but it ultimately doesn’t work.

Instead, the movie features a plot twist with Janeane Garofalo’s deeply underdeveloped character. I like Garofalo and she’s certainly not a bad actress but the script lets her down by not giving her any arc or time to develop the character into anyone we have any investment in morally or ethically. Meanwhile, Grammer is acting like a villain with his belittling of Stiles’ character’s reliance on emotions and his general, unlikable gruffness.

Instead of developing Garofalo’s character in any way other than expository dialogue from Grammer, Stark’s script places focus on the failing and unbelievable romantic relationship between Grammer and Stiles. I’m not saying that such a May-December romance is out of the question, per se, but Grammer would have to have an appealing quality for us to believe in the romance or not think less of Stiles’ character for her poor choice in men and mentors.

The God Committee is desperately overwrought and fails a cast full of ringers with underwritten characters and cliched, fourth wall breaking, bad dialogue. The romance and the time shifting narrative are a pair of bad ideas that are compromised further by a script filled with over-written lines that feel so unnatural that they break the fourth wall. That line I mentioned at the top of this review, 'You fail to remember, the heart is just a muscle,' is a bad line of dialogue because it calls attention to the screenwriter.

You can sense the screenwriter asking for high fives for his remarkable wordplay. The line is then delivered by Grammer as if he had a metaphorical mic in his hand which he could drop in celebration of his own genius. The line plays like it should have the meme of that guy staring into the camera while his friends all scream and fall over with laughter. Julia Stiles got 'pwned.'

The God Committee opened in limited theatrical release and on streaming rental release on July 2nd, 2021.