AIn the British private school’s incredible journey from outcast to South American cowboy, from American prime-time TV naturalist to American health care savior, he has to be among the strangest. The late philanthropist Stan Brock single-handedly refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s old diktat on America’s Second Act by providing free medical treatment to millions of uninsured people – starting in 1985 – through his nonprofit Remote Area Medical (RAM). This turn to altruism, told in this documentary with flashes of Boy’s Own talent, is all the more remarkable in light of Brock’s borderline abusive upbringing that pushed him into a rocky self-reliance as a young man.
Even in his seventies and directing needy citizens to RAM’s mobile clinics, Brock still maintains a strong, athletic figure. In his heyday, riding the largest cattle ranch in the world and wrestling anacondas on the savannah of what was then British Guiana, he looks like someone out of an H Rider Haggard novel. This was the muscular package that struck TV gold as co-host for the 1960s series Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and, in short, an action movie star in schlock like 1976. Escape from Angola.
But haunted by the death of a fellow cowboy from influenza while on the road, Brock belatedly began to feel guilty about how little he had done for his native Rupununi saddlemates. So he founded RAM in the 1980s, initially to bring health care to rural Mexico, and then to address the poverty evident throughout the organization’s home state of Tennessee. Brock constantly protests that he doesn’t have the people skills to be a natural frontman for the organization. However, it is precisely this clumsiness that gives him a disarming and somewhat saintly appearance, as he points out the absurdity that prevents American healthcare professionals from crossing state lines to provide free treatment.
Director Paul Michael Angell has undoubtedly hit the documentary mother lode with this ascetic figure, who sleeps on a roll-up mattress in RAM’s office. But his story is so compelling that it means Angell tells the myth without pushing the somewhat mysterious Brock into more illuminating personal territory. One suspects that the latter suffered from the film’s infringement because of the publicity it would bring to the case. But judging by the desperate gratitude shown by so many patients here, this film, if it finally becomes PR, will be of the unquestionable kind.
