The Healer (2017)

Paco Arango's The Healer arrives with its heart in the correct anatomical position and its head somewhere else entirely. Alec Bailey, an electrical engineer with a gambling habit and a dead twin brother, is shipped off to Nova Scotia by an estranged uncle who offers to settle his debts. A misprint in the local paper advertises him as a man who can fix anything, and the town promptly begins presenting him with the terminally ill. It is a faith-healing fable calibrated for the Sunday afternoon cable slot, and its profits went to Paul Newman's SeriousFun camps. Critics were unmoved. The cause was noble. The film was not.

The cast is white to a degree that reads less like a decision than a default. Jorge Garcia and Suresh John appear in supporting roles that carry no weight of identity whatsoever, which is to say they are simply present. Cecilia works as a veterinarian and Abigail is a spirited teenager with cancer, but both women exist to steer Alec toward his own emotional breakthrough. Race is never raised. The environment is never raised. Alec's debt and the Russian collectors who chase him into a church are plot machinery, not an indictment of anyone's economic arrangements. There is nothing here for the cultural archaeologist to excavate.

The residue is a gentle sermon about selflessness, delivered without much conviction and with a great deal of earnest music. Alec refuses the gift, loses it, demands it back from God, and gets it. The moral is personal redemption, the kind that has been filmed a thousand times and will be filmed a thousand more. Nobody is scolded about their politics. Everybody is scolded, mildly, about their priorities. The film ends with a framed portrait in a basement and a dedication to a dead philanthropist, which is a more honest summary of its ambitions than any of the dialogue manages.