Seducing Dr Lewis

Rating:
Summary: lots of charm
Review: I was fortunate enough to see this show at the Sundance Film Festival where it took the audience's choice award. The audience's reaction to this show was strong.

This movie is about a small fishing village in Canada where the fishing was no longer viable and in order to restore dignity through meaningful employment the town seeks to get a factory established in the town. However, there is a hitch to the factory aggreeing to move its operation to this town; there must be a full-time doctor living in the town. Therefore the village sets out to seduce Dr. Lewis into committing to stay for five years. Anyway, great movie, a lot of humor, and a lot of charm.

Rating:
Summary: lots of charm
Review: I was fortunate enough to see this show at the Sundance Film Festival where it took the audience's choice award. The audience's reaction to this show was strong.

This movie is about a small fishing village in Canada where the fishing was no longer viable and in order to restore dignity through meaningful employment the town seeks to get a factory established in the town. However, there is a hitch to the factory aggreeing to move its operation to this town; there must be a full-time doctor living in the town. Therefore the village sets out to seduce Dr. Lewis into committing to stay for five years. Anyway, great movie, a lot of humor, and a lot of charm.

Rating:
Summary: Cozy charm...
Review: What will a village go through to get back their dignity is the question this film poses. And in this case, the answer is quite a bit.

St. Marie La Mauderne has seen better days. The town's main employment, fishing, has gone the way of the dinosaur, and most of the once-proud citizens have been on welfare for several years. Enter the prospect of a factory which would employ all who wished to work, but there's a catch: they require a doctor in residence. It seems like a hopeless situation, but then the citizenry get lucky--a Montreal doctor has an altercation with a cop who turns out to be the former mayor of St. Marie, and a month-long stay is negotiated. It is then up to the villagers to make the young doctor want to stay, and so begins their seduction of Dr. Lewis using, among other things, cricket, a tapped phone, and beef stroganoff.

In a way, it reminds me of Doc Hollywood, the late '80's film starring Michael J. Fox, who is forced to practice medicine in a small town after a car accident, but in this film the town pretends it is something it is not in order to woo him into staying.

I very much enjoyed this movie, despite my growing indignation as the film went on of the town's emotional manipulation of the doctor, who turns out to be kind of goofy and sweet. All is worked out in the end, thankfully, and the end is a satisfying and happy one. A very charming film...