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AWAKENINGS: Look Back with Longing

© Sean Gallagher

The second Best Picture nominee under discussion here is a film which may seem like a made-for-TV Disease-of-the-Week movie instead of the genuinely moving story that it is. AWAKENINGS, adapted from Oliver Sacks' book, turns out to be mostly a winner, and a height which its director, Penny Marshall, and its lead actor, Robin Williams, would not find again (to be fair, Williams did come close a few times).

Based on a true story, the film's story is fairly simple; Dr. Sayer (Williams) is a neurologist in 1969 who comes to a hospital in the Bronx. One of the wards at the hospital is filled with people suffering from encephalitis - they look awake, but they're comatose. He soon discovers these patients still have their motor functions, and even part of their impulse functions (one patient can walk on the floor as long as the floor follows a pattern). Over the initial objections of his superior, Dr. Kaufman (John Heard), he decides to test a drug used on patients with Parkinson's disease on Leonard (Robert DeNiro), one of the comatose patients. Leonard wakes up, and from all appearances seems normal. Sayer soon tests it out on the other patients, and they too all seem normal. But then side effects of the drug creep in (Leonard develops involuntary tics).

Sacks told this story with quirky humor, and some criticized Marshall and writer Steve Zaillian for sentimentalizing that humor. But I think it's decent sentiment, because they invest us in the characters first, instead of trying to manipulate us with the story. Also, while the patients' awakening means, of course, some what to live life to the fullest, some don't (one patient (George Martin) grouses he's got no one to share anything with anymore, while another (Alice Drummond) feels time has passed her by), and the film is honest about that. Finally, this is a story without heroes or villains (while Sayer and Kaufman are often at odds, this is in philosophical terms), just people, and Marshall and Zaillian don't make the mistake of trying to add melodrama. This honest sentiment, which Marshall also showed in BIG, would soon become just plain sentiment in later films like RENAISSANCE MAN and THE PREACHER'S WIFE, but none of that is in evidence here.

Curiously, the one misstep of the movie involves DeNiro. Early on, he's completely convincing when Leonard is comatose, of course. And when he wakes up, instead of instantly jumping around and celebrating, you see him slowly taking it all in, and giving off a sense of joy and inner calm. You get the sense of a man who wants to take time to think things through. Even when he wants to put off his mother (Ruth Nelson), whom he thinks has become overprotective, he does it gently but firmly. And his relationship with Paula (Penelope Ann Miller), a woman whose father is in the hospital, is nicely developed without ever getting sappy. But when Leonard's condition worsens, the actor disappears and the technique takes over. What happened to Leonard may be accurately portrayed, but I found it conventional and a rare melodramatic lapse in the film.