How do you honor the accomplishments of working-class people who have survived a recent traumatic event? That’s one of a handful of challenges that seemingly overwhelmed the makers of “The First Wave,” a canned slice-of-life documentary about New York City-based survivors and medical experts during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic (March through June 2020, according to an early on-screen text).
Admittedly, “The First Wave” often feels like the sort of project that shouldn’t be attempted—or more likely completed—for another few years. We’re more than a year-and-a-half into this (hopefully) abating global crisis, but excerpted press conference footage of former governor Andrew Cuomo already feels inadequate, especially given that Cuomo’s often shown dispensing his signature brand of paternal advice.
And even if you could somehow look at Cuomo without thinking about nursing home deaths and sexual harassment, it would still be hard to ignore the fundamental disconnect between what he’s saying—ex: calling the virus “a character test for us individually, a character test for us collectively"—and the distressing footage presented throughout “The First Wave,” a reductive snapshot of the global pandemic as it was experienced by a handful of COVID-19 patients, their family members, and their doctors.
The first half of “The First Wave” plays out like a manic and deeply confused survival horror drama that also tries to uplift viewers by applauding COVID-19 survivors and the people that helped them through an impossible moment. Viewers are worn down by impressionistic hospital scenes that dwell on hyper-real footage of physical illness and psychological trauma—lots of slow-motion, over-exposed extreme close-ups, and cloying orchestral music cues—before overwrought talking head interviews remind us that we’re looking at real people with family members and individual personalities.
We first see NYPD school safety officer Ahmed Ellis as an object of pity and morbid fascination: a bypass mask covers his face and helps him breathe, as we’re reminded by the retrospectively exaggerated beeps and hisses of medical equipment on the soundtrack. Then Alexis Ellis, Ahmed’s wife, explains that she’s “just hoping for the best right now” after she tells us that her husband’s health was at high risk, given that he’s overweight and diabetic. We see video footage of Ahmed and Alexis’ wedding. Then we’re shown Ahmed’s sweaty brow—and deeply ringed eyes—as a nurse asks him if he can open his eyes; her voice echoes on the soundtrack, as if to further goose the drama of the moment. Ahmed opens his eyes and we feel relieved, because that’s how this sort of unbearable feel-good narrative works.
Alexis’ story provides some emotional ballast for Ahmed’s shaky recovery, but she’s mostly defined by stingy appeals to viewers’ emotions, like when Alexis’ friends surprise her with a virtual Zoom birthday party. Her cheekbones are lit up by her tablet’s screen as she tries to put on a show of composure for her Georgian friends ("We goin' to the Turkey Hut?"). Then "Here Comes the Sun" plays as we transition to the next hospital-set scene, because the hospital workers play music whenever somebody comes off the respirator and, as one nurse says, "This is your song." A supervising physician, Dr. Nathalie Dougé, suggests more in less time during her scenes, like when she says that she feels kinship with her patients, many of who are Haitian-American Bronx residents, like her parents.
Dougé becomes a more prominent character during the movie’s relatively ambitious back half, which pays lip service to the notion that the pandemic only worsened pre-existing social inequity throughout the city. “I’m tired of seeing people like you in the hospital,” she cries when she embraces a fellow African-American protester at a Black Lives Matter protest. It’s a moving scene, but not a revealing one given how little we know about Dougé beyond her sympathetic off-the-cuff remarks. She’s very credible when she says that "when we started chanting 'I can't breathe', something just took a hold of me, where I literally felt like my breath was stripped away." But such an overwhelming statement demands more contextualizing information than the makers of “The First Wave” attempt to provide.
Your tolerance and investment may vary, but I found “The First Wave” to be a painful sit, and not because of what I was looking at, but how it was presented. I didn’t care to watch Ahmed Ellis struggle to give his doctors a thumbs up while they tried to keep him alive. It’s up to the individual viewer to decide how they want to respond to this sort of contrived human interest storytelling, but I didn’t feel much beyond distress and panic as I watched this distractingly finessed documentary. People’s characters were and still are tested by the COVID-19 virus, but “The First Wave” isn’t worthy of their ongoing struggles.
Now playing in theaters.
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