Alexis Zegerman’s The Fever Syndrome, directed by Roxana Silbert, is a big American dysfunctional family drama. The setting is a massive old three-story house in New York, open on one side like a doll’s house and showing three tiny cramped rooms and a staircase with a stairlift.
The leading character is a bad-tempered elderly professor (Robert Lindsay), a great IVF innovator, who has created thousands of babies. He is about to receive a lifetime achievement award.
He is in his seventies, has Parkinson’s Disease and is in a wheelchair. He has been married three times and has three children in their forties, a girl and twin boys.
His daughter (Lisa Dillon) is married and has a chronically ill 12-year-old daughter (Nancy Allsop), who has fever syndrome, an auto inflammatory disease. She wants to have another baby, a perfect baby. Her husband (Bo Poraj), a disgraced scientist, demurs.
One of the twins (Alex Waldmann), a successful painter, is in a gay relationship. His partner (Jake Fairbrother) wants them to get married. The other twin (Sam Marks) is an unreliable entrepreneur. His stepmother (Alexandra Gilbreath) flirts with him.
The dysfunctional family gathers for Thanksgiving. There is more debate than drama. There is debate about caring for the elderly and disabled and there is debate about inheritance and who shall get the money.
There is also debate about genes. “We are (I quote the text) slaves to our genes. Worse than that we are slaves to our parents’ genes. Life itself is a mistake: one evolutionary genetic mutation after another.”
Overwrought, overwritten and overlong (2 hours 50 minutes including interval), there are too many characters and too much talk.
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