An unquiet death, quietly observed

Malcolm Pointon is, in the terms of last week's news agenda, the man who didn't die while Paul Watson was filming. And yet he died 1,000 deaths on camera, from his awful realisation moment during an early Alzheimer's test, right through to his last flicker of consciousness before slipping into a terminal coma. The camera was not there when, three days later, his heart beat its last but it would be a pity if Love's Farewell was remembered for what it didn't show rather than what it did. A pity and an irony too, because if the programme told you anything, it was that death by Alzheimer's does not happen in a heartbeat but over an achingly long period. Filmed, on-and-off, for 11 years, this was otherwise as complete a portrait of such a death as it could be possible to make.

Unbearably complete, in some ways. As you watched you wondered if this man's final degradations - his confused aggression towards his wife, his torturous bodily functions - should have remained private. It was like the donation of a living body to medical science - or if not science, then certainly medical awareness, since this film had a campaigning purpose, its mission being to burn the agony of Alzheimer's indelibly on the retina of public consciousness.

This it did, without doubt. The film was strikingly free from modern squeamishness, almost Medieval in its preoccupation with and acceptance of death. It did not flinch from the sight of Malcolm's withered body, as skeletal as a figure by Cranach the Elder. It included the theatrical indignity of him being winched from bed by a huge contraption that was like a parody of a baby's sling. And, as in a morality play, Death even showed up in a ghostly rictus discernable in the contours of one of Malcolm's brain scans. "This film is about a killer," narrated Watson, and suddenly the brain scan had morphed into a Wanted poster for Death itself.

As a filmmaker Paul Watson is alive to the poetry of his subjects, which is a good thing considering his subjects are so unutterably bleak. He took a break from capturing Malcolm's decline to film in an old people's home, while fitting in a documentary about death-by-alcoholism on the side. Yet he is such a close, intelligent observer that he always manages to find some redeeming point of interest which elevates the situation above the televisual misery memoir. There was a moment when Malcolm, starting to struggle with his vocabulary, said his father was "a slipper in the wit house". The tragedy of brain degeneration had, for a second, its own Modernist poetry.

And yet perhaps it was this artistic impulse that led Watson to make the misjudgement which now dogs this film and his career itself. Instead of explaining that Malcolm had finally died three days later, when the cameras weren't present, his first edit of the film allowed the viewer to believe they were witnessing his actual death rather than the 999th death out of a thousand. Watson's original commentary didn't explicitly lie; it simply said that "by day's end Malcolm's journey would be done". But this euphemism allowed the viewer a catharsis that real life denies. It showed a loyalty to the arc of the story rather than to the messier truth, and as such it was a betrayal of Watson's own high standards. As Epicteus said, it is through trying to please that we are undone.

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