Awakenings

Released 1990
Starring: Robin Williams
Actors: Robert De Niro Julie Kavner Ruth Nelson John Heard Penelope Ann Miller Alice Drummond.
Director: Penny Marshall
Screenwriter: Steven Zaillian, based on Oliver Sacks’ novel

Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2003
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The 1920s saw an outbreak of a virus that made sufferers "experience" a lasting and subdued state of unconsciousness commonly called sleeping sickness. Forty years later – in the summer of 1969 – the miracle drug L-DOPA is administered to these patients who have been in a comatose state for most of their lives. The result alleviates their symptoms, at least temporarily, in what at one stage reminded me of Cocoon gone medical.

Based on physician Oliver Sack’s novel Awakenings the sympathetic doctor in this film version is played by Robin Williams. Dr Malcolm Sayer (Williams) is an introvert more interested in researching plants and earthworms than working with people. When he is assigned to a position in a psychiatric ward in the Bronx he is initially reluctant to work with these patients. Yet, his journey will not only prove rewarding for those under him, but will also precipitate a better understanding of himself.

The first half plays sentimentally, overly dramatically, and self-conscious as if director Penny Marshall is a herald for the human rights of these human beings, a phrase over used at the beginning and which has obvious connotations and intentions (just remember every so often to inadvertently tell the audience that these patients are human beings). It is meandering when Sayer’s central trait of introversion and self depreciation is reiterated unnecessarily during a party scene that works like Cocoon gone medical, particularly jarring since this is intended as a medical and human drama and not the next word on the fountain of youth.

Especially yucky is how Leonard and Sayer communicate to one another after the wonder drug has worked. One scene shows prolonged zoom in close ups of smiley faces bathing in their happiness for Leonard’s improvement, a camera move that reiterates with heaps of smulch this recurrent motif of the awe-inspiring pseudo-miracle that is Leonard’s. There is so much of a build up in the first half with several emotional climaxes peppered around liberally. As if tissues will be well used already.

This is a film with a heartfelt message, a good one at that, but the second half secures it movingly.

The only way this film works is because of Robert De Niro. His performance is nothing short of breathless, superbly and convincingly conveying the tensions and underlying pain of Leonard as well as his physical problems. During the final half his character is brought more into focus showing how he deals with neurological deterioration as the drugs wear thin. The humiliation of presenting himself as what he regards as only half a human being to a girl friend he met in hospital, and the aftermath of this meeting, is one of the film’s real moments. The second half is where the depiction of the human condition is acutely painful and moving to watch. When Williams gives his speech at the end, it works – along with De Niro’s pain we see a functional humanity that through decay a vision of hope is still not lost.