‘Gifted Hands’: Revisiting the Made-for-TV Ben Carson Biopic
At the end of last night’s Republican presidential debate, Dr. Ben Carson was granted one last opportunity to appeal to voters before the Super Tuesday primaries inevitably force him to suspend his undead campaign. The retired neurosurgeon, whose personal charisma could generously be likened to that of a hung-over DMV agent, was determined not to throw away his shot. He raised both of his arms in front of him, turned his palms to the country, and unleashed his signature drawl:
“Several years ago, a movie was made about these hands. These hands, by the grace of God, have saved many lives and healed many families.”
Immaculate showman that he is, Carson naturally neglected to provide the title of the film — Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story — or to inform people as to where they might be able to watch it, i.e. YouTube, where someone has graciously ripped the video from a bootlegged Russian DVD. Of course, it’s possible that Carson was deliberately attempting to obscure the fact that the movie is a made-for-TV hagiography starring a post-Radio Cuba Gooding, Jr. (In this fevered Lynchian nightmare of an election cycle, you really can’t rule anything out.) On the other hand, we’re talking about a man who’s used his national media attention to repeatedly brag about stabbing someone, so the odds that there was anything remotely self-aware about Carson’s sign-off are slim.
It was a strange moment for him to remind the American people that his life story was the stuff of a basic-cable movie, particularly when the movies about rival candidates Marco Rubio (Election), Donald Trump (A Clockwork Orange) and Ted Cruz (Zodiac) have all been so good. But Carson is the guy who said that he would look at the “fruit salad” of someone’s life when considering them for a job, and Gifted Hands is nothing if not the fruit salad of his own.
Directed by Thomas Carter (Swing Kids) and shot with all the panache of a corporate-mandated sexual harassment video, Gifted Hands premiered on TNT on February 7th, 2009. The movie was a modest success, its 4.23 million viewers making it the 11th-most watched cable program of its week — it outperformed a Lakers game, but couldn’t quite compete with iCarly, Burn Notice, or three separate episodes of NCIS. Adapted from the good doctor’s 1996 memoir of the same name, this Sunday-school version of The Knick is a lot like his presidential campaign: both nauseatingly safe and profoundly absurd. The Hollywood Reporter remarked that the film “had Emmy written all over it.” The Hollywood Reporter was wrong.
It opens on the fateful 1987 day when Carson (a heavily sedated Gooding) was asked to examine a pair of German babies — conjoined twins — in the hopes that he might be able to separate them in a way that would allow each of the young boys to live a reasonably normal life and function autonomously. “I wanted to kill myself when I learned the truth,” their mother says, “but then I realized I would be killing two other beings, too.” Don’t worry, clumsily shoehorned mouthpiece for the religious right, Dr. Carson will take care of all the killing for you. But first, a dramatically inert tour of his life.