Awakenings

For this entire month, I will be reviewing films starring Robert De Niro that I have yet to cover. Let’s take a look at the 1990 classic, “Awakenings.”

We do not know what we see when we look at Leonard. Roger Ebert said in his review, “We think we see a human vegetable, a peculiar man who has been frozen in the same position for 30 years, who neither moves nor speaks.” What goes on in his head? Is he thinking? Of course not, a neurologist says in Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings.” Why not? “Because the implications of that would be unthinkable.” Ebert said, “Ah, but the expert is wrong, and inside the immobile shell of his body, Leonard is still there. Still waiting.”

Leonard is one of the patients in the “garden,” a ward of a Bronx psychiatric hospital that is named by the staff because the patients are there just to be fed and bathed. Looks like nothing can be done for them. They were victims of the great “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the 1920s, and after a time of sudden recovery they relapsed to their current situation. It is 1969. They have many different symptoms, but essentially, they all have the same problem: They cannot make their bodies do what their minds want. Ebert noted, “Sometimes that blockage is manifested through bizarre physical behavior, sometimes through apparent paralysis.”

One day a new doctor comes to work in the hospital. He has no experience working with patients. Actually, his last project involved earthworms. Like those who have gone before him, he has no hope for these patients, who are there and yet not there. Ebert said, “He talks without hope to one of the women, who looks blankly back at him, her head and body frozen.” However, he then turns away, and when he turns back, she has changed her position – apparently trying to catch her eyeglasses as they fell. He tries an experiment. He holds her glasses in front of her, and then drops them. Her hand reacts quickly and catches them.

However, the woman cannot move through her own will. He tries another experiment, throwing a ball at one of the patients. She catches it. “She is borrowing the will of the ball,” the doctor thinks. His colleagues will not listen to this theory, which sounds strangely metaphysical, but he thinks he’s getting somewhere. What if these patients are not actually “frozen” at all, but victims of a stage of Parkinson’s Disease so advanced that their motor impulses are cancelling each other – what if they cannot move because all of their muscles are trying to move at the same time, and they are unable to choose one impulse over the other? Then the falling glasses or the tossed ball might be breaking the restraint.

Ebert pointed out, “This is the great discovery in the opening scenes of “Awakenings,” preparing the way for sequences of enormous joy and heartbreak, as the patients are “awakened” to a personal freedom they had lost all hope of ever again experiencing — only to find that their liberation comes with its own cruel set of conditions.” The film, directed with greatness and emotion by Penny Marshall, is based on a famous 1972 book by Oliver Sacks, the British-born New York neurologist whose The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a classic in the medical field. These were his patients, and the doctor in the film, named Malcolm Sayer and played by Robin Williams, is based on him. Williams had the opportunity to meet Sacks.

Ebert noted, “What he discovered in the summer of 1969 was that L-DOPA, a new drug for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease, might in massive doses break the deadlock that had frozen his patients into a space-time lock for endless years.” The film follows maybe 15 of those patients, mainly Leonard, who is played by Robert De Niro in a brilliant performance. Because this movie is not a tearjerker but a smart look at a bizarre human condition, it depends on De Niro to make Leonard not a character of sympathy, but a person who helps us think about our own fragile look on the world around us.

Ebert compared, “The patients depicted in this film have suffered a fate more horrible than the one in Poe’s famous story about premature burial. If we were locked in a coffin while still alive, at least we would soon suffocate. But to be locked inside a body that cannot move or speak — to look out mutely as even our loved ones talk about us as if we were an uncomprehending piece of furniture!” It is this fate that is seen, that summer of 1969, when the doctor gives the experimental new drug to his patients, and in a miraculous rebirth they are free and begin to move and talk once again, some of them after 30 years of self-captivity.

The movie follows Leonard through the stages of his rebirth. He was (as we saw in the beginning) a bright, likeable kid, until the disease took over. He has been like that for three decades. Now, in the late 1940s, he is filled with joy and gratitude to be able to move around freely and express himself. He cooperates with the doctors studying his case. Also, he finds himself liking a daughter (Penelope Ann Miller) of another patient. Ebert mentioned, “Love and lust stir within him for the first time.”

Dr. Sayer is at the focus of almost every scene, and his personality becomes one of the highlights of the movie. He is also restraint: by shyness and inexperience, and even the way he holds his arms, close to his sides, shows a man cautious of contact. He was happier working with the earthworms. Ebert commented, “This is one of Robin Williams’ best performances, pure and uncluttered, without the ebullient distractions he sometimes adds — the schtick where none is called for.” He is a lovable man here, who experiences the amazing professional joy of seeing chronic, hopeless patients once again sing and dance and meet their loved ones.

However, it is not as simple as that, not after the first weeks. Ebert said, “The disease is not an open-and-shut case. And as the movie unfolds, we are invited to meditate on the strangeness and wonder of the human personality. Who are we, anyway? How much of the self we treasure so much is simply a matter of good luck, of being spared in a minefield of neurological chance? If one has no hope, which is better: To remain hopeless, or to be given hope and then lose it again? Oliver Sacks’ original book, which has been reissued, is as much a work of philosophy as of medicine. After seeing “Awakenings,” I read it, to know more about what happened in that Bronx hospital.” What both the movie and the book show is the huge courage of the patients and the deep experience of their doctors, as in a small way they reexperienced what it means to be born, to open your eyes and discover to your surprise that “you” are alive.

If you haven’t seen this movie, why are you reading this review? This is one of the best movies ever made. I’m not saying that because I’m a Robin Williams fan, but I seriously believe this movie was one of the groundbreakers of its time. Check it out if you haven’t because you will love it.

Apologies for the late post. Some personal stuff came up and I got delayed a lot. Stay tuned next week when I look at a film that I saw parts of growing up when we first got cable in “Robert De Niro Month.”