The Farewell Party treats euthanasia lightly but leaves a deep impression

Assisted suicide was illegal in Israel until last year, when the first court-approved case of euthanasia was carried out. The Farewell Party, winner of four Ophirs (Israel’s “Oscars”), including one for cinematography,deliberates with droll sagacity what one act of “mercy-killing” may lead to.

Yehezkel (Ze’ev Revach) and his beloved wife, Levana (Levana Finkelstein), live in a Jerusalem retirement community. Yehezkel tends to his elderly neighbors, like Zelda, who is succumbing to cancer. He won’t let her give up. “You’re on the list for heaven,” he tells her over the phone, identifying himself in a deep voice as God, “but we currently don’t have any vacancies. So, I’d like you to continue your treatments.”

But when his terminally ill friend Max, pleads, “Help me get it over with,” Yehezkel is torn. Over his wife’s protests, Yehezkel, an amateur inventor, fashions from a bicycle chain and other scrap metal a simple device that allows a patient to self-administer a lethal cocktail. A retired veterinarian supplies the drugs.

Word of the machine’s “success” spreads through the retirement community, and requests to be next in line pour in. Levana, herself losing a battle with dementia, needles her husband after Max’s death: “You’re a murderer, not a serial killer.” In Levana, the film brilliantly forges a narrow path through the middle of the controversy: Is opposition to euthanasia madness, or is murder obvious even to the psychologically impaired?

Some situations and dialogue in The Farewell Party (not yet rated, but likely R for thematic material, some nudity and sexual situations, and brief language) rival Woody Allen’s best scenes. At the hospital, Yehezkel and his septuagenarian accomplices remove Max’s fingertip pulse oximeter but must pass it quickly among themselves until one registers a pulse strong enough to fool the electronic monitor at the nurses’ station. On the other hand, a homosexual relationship involving the retired veterinarian is gratuitous.

Christians, ministering to those in suffering or accepting their own, must have the faith to let God be God. The Farewell Party demonstrates what happens when “I” supplants I AM. Playing God, Yehezkel drills a small hole in the moral levee, releasing a torrent that sweeps many away and swirls back around the head of the one he loves most.

With Israel’s first step over the line, the producers of The Farewell Party may be warning their country that it’s cascading towards Europe, where euthanasia is commonplace, and in the Netherlands and Belgium legal even for children.