Jim Allison: Breakthrough
Great documentaries make us feel as though we are taking a journey with the subject. Admittedly, that can be the case with movies, in general, but there’s something just a bit more personal with a documentary. It boils down to the fact that the story is genuine, true to life, and has significance to people outside of our own experience. The story of Jim Allison, however, might have impact to us as individuals, one day, given what we are witness to throughout the film’s 90-minute running time.
As far as diseases go, cancer is one of the most deadly, and it is one where a diagnosis can mean physical pain even if you go into remission. Jim Allison lost his mother to the disease when he was young, and it had a profound impact on him, and his path in life. A curiosity and interest in science and biology led him pursue it at a time where teachers in Texas were trying to dissuade discussion of evolution in classes, but he persevered, and turned his attention to cancer research, and trying to understand the ways T-cells work in fighting off diseases. His journey will take him to California and New York, and, eventually, Sweden, where he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, before taking him back to Texas, and the grind of helping people who, upon diagnosis, feel like they’ve been sentenced to death.
Bill Haney’s documentary doesn’t do anything more than tell Allison’s story, what motivates him, and the long road he and his team took in discovering a drug that would give profound hope to patients without the rigors of chemotherapy. By starting with his childhood, and continuing through to the present day, we see that Allison’s pursuits are not just scientific curiosity, but the drive of a man whom would rather devote his energies to saving people from the pain he experienced when he was young than just sit idly by and let other people do the work. I don’t remember much in terms of biology from school, but “Breakthrough” gives us a crash course in how our immune system works, and how it doesn’t work- and why it doesn’t work- that is both informative, as well as easy to understand when Allison and his team are explaining what they are trying to do. It’s a crash course in medical science to go along with the harsh realities they bump up against when financial concerns from drug companies raise the stakes when it comes to how these treatments work in humans. The film follows a great through line from one to the other in a narrative that is made all the more compelling when we meet a Melanoma patient whose diagnosis was a death sentence, but whose remission made possible through Allison’s research and breakthrough has given her a chance to live. The journey we take to get to that moment with both Allison and the patient is one of those great, emotional journeys only documentaries are capable of taking us on.
