Penny Marshall (1990)

In 1969, the neurologist Oliver Sacks reanimated a group of patients in a New York hospital who had been frozen for many years in physical immobility and apparent mental apathy by the effects of encephalitis lethargica.  Sacks administered huge doses of L-Dopa, a drug used in smaller quantities to treat Parkinson’s Disease.  After the violent euphoria of their awakening, the patients fought colossal physiological and emotional turbulence before reverting to more or less unrelieved catatonia.  It’s often not a good sign when a film informs you at the start that it’s based on a true story; in this case, Penny Marshall’s picture (from a screenplay by Steven Zaillian) amounts to a virtual fictionalisation – certainly a dispiriting banalisation – of Sacks’s book.  Based on extraordinary and emotionally complex material, the movie is persistently reminiscent – of Charly, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rain Man, My Left Foot – and easily evasive of complication and mixed, troublesome feelings.  For example, Sacks’s alter ego, Dr Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams), pleads with the (standard) unhelpful hospital authorities to let him use L-Dopa:  he ‘knows’ the patients are mentally alive.  Having woken them up, he doesn’t bother to check that he was right.  He does ask a sweet elderly lady what year it is:  she replies that, of course, it’s 1926.  This moment, which should be overpowering, is just wanly sad.  With one brief exception, Penny Marshall cuts out entirely on the patients’ having to confront the loss of most of their lives.

This emotional dilution carries right through the film and affects both the two main characters.  The ‘violent and thwarted erotomania’ (as Sacks describes it) of a patient called Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro) is transformed into a courteously controlled attraction to a lovely young woman (Penelope Ann Miller, who gives a fresh and sensitive performance) visiting her father in the hospital.  The timid but saintly Dr Sayer (seemingly nothing like Sacks) experiences a personal ‘awakening’ into full humanity – he just about manages to invite the chief nurse for a cup of coffee at the end of the film – which is worked up into a pat and risible counterpart to the patients’ story.  (There are other bogus, mismatched offshoots of efflorescent humanity:  a synchronised hands-in-pockets by the hospital staff and governors to finance further L-Dopa supplies is paired with a roomful of patients waking simultaneously.)  Robert De Niro does some amazing things:  when Leonard first wakes from his trance, the ambivalence in his eyes and smile is tantalising; as Leonard loses control of his body, De Niro is startlingly consumed by an intensity of tics and trembling.  One is frustratedly aware of how much further the actor could go than the script and direction allow him to.  It’s to be hoped Robin Williams made this picture because he wanted to work with De Niro rather than do a variation on the impossible-not-to-like, thwarted heroes he’d played in his last two major films:  Willams’s energy seems as imprisoned as the patients’ spirits by the limits of the absent-minded, self-doubting scientist cliché he’s stuck with.  He’s at his most expressive in the early scenes with Leonard after the latter’s awakening.  Williams manages to suggest that Sayer’s shyness is such that it makes him easier to relate to a man starting to rebuild a social personality from scratch – but he’s given no chance to develop this idea.

At the end of Awakenings, we’re told that ‘Dr Sayer still works in New York’ – even though Dr Sayer isn’t a real person.  This is an odd final twist to a film that manages to make you disbelieve in something that really happened.  With Julie Kavner as the head nurse (she does well in a feeble role), John Heard, Anne Meara, Dexter Gordon. The remarkably obvious music is by Randy Newman.

[1990s]