Awakenings

Awakenings

We cannot identify what we observe in Leonard. We believe we see a human vegetable, an odd man who has remained stuck for three decades, motionless and mute. What happens within his brain? Does it work in there? No way, says a neurologist in Penny Marshall’s new film “Awakenings.” Why not? “Because the implications of that would be unthinkable.” But the specialist is mistaken; Leonard is still inside the immobile shell of his body. Still waiting.

Leonard is one of many patients in the “garden,” a ward at a Bronx mental hospital so called by its staff because they are there merely to be fed and watered. They seem beyond help. They were stricken during the great sleeping sickness epidemic of the ’20s, and after seeming to recover they relapsed into their present states. It is 1969. Their symptoms vary widely but basically they all have the same trouble: their bodies will not do what their minds want them to do. Sometimes this blockage finds expression in bizarre physical behavior, sometimes in apparent paralysis.

One day a new doctor arrives at the hospital. He has had no experience with patients; his most recent project involved earthworms. Like his predecessors, he has no special hope for these wraiths who are here and yet not here but he talks without hope to one woman, who stares back at him blankly with her head and body frozen. Then he turns away, and when he turns back she has changed her position apparently trying to catch her eyeglasses as they fell off. He tries an experiment: He holds them in front of her; then drops them; she snatches them quickly out of the air.

However, this lady cannot move by her own volition. He tries another test, throwing a ball at one of the patients. She catches it. “She is borrowing the will of the ball,” the doctor muses. But when he tries to explain his theory to his colleagues, they won’t listen; it sounds too metaphysical for them. But what if these patients aren’t “frozen” at all? What if they’re victims of a stage of Parkinson’s Disease so advanced that their motor impulses are canceling each other out what if they can’t move because all their muscles are trying to move at once, and they can’t choose one impulse over another? Then maybe the falling glasses or the tossed ball might break the deadlock!

This is the great discovery of “Awakenings,” in its opening scenes, and after this breakthrough there are scenes of enormous joy and heartbreak as patients who have despaired all their lives of ever again having personal freedom find themselves alive in a new century with breath in their bodies only to learn that liberation has its own cruel terms. The movie, directed by Penny Marshall with brains and heart, is based on Oliver Sacks’ famous 1972 book (Sacks is played onscreen by Robin Williams as Dr. Malcolm Sayer), which was inspired by his experiences with these patients.

What he discovered in 1969 was that L-DOPA, then an experimental drug for Parkinsonism, could free people from a specific kind of space-time lock: It seemed to blast open some channel through which we organize our perception of ourselves as singular beings inside distinct bodies living forward through time. Or something like that: I’m doing my best to describe maybe a dozen pages here even though it’s not Oliver Sacks’ book I’m reviewing but Penny Marshall’s film. Among those affected were Leonard (Robert De Niro) and his mother (Ruth Nelson), who had herself spent most of her life caring for a son whom everybody except she had given up on.

What he discovered in the summer of 1969 was that L-DOPA might, in massive doses, break the deadlock that had frozen his patients into a space-time lock for endless years. The film follows some 15 of those patients, particularly Leonard (Robert De Niro) and Lucy (Alice Drummond). We feel their joy when they can move again hold a cup, walk down the hallway and we share their sadness when the drug begins to lose its effectiveness. What’s especially impressive about De Niro’s performance is how he creates these two characters: Leonard as a man whose body has been freed but whose spirit has not, and Lucy as a woman who never really came back at all, but just showed up for an hour or so each day to play cards.

The patients depicted in this film have suffered a fate more horrible than 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 lifted, that summer of 1969, when the doctor gives the experimental new drug to his patients, and in a miraculous rebirth their bodies thaw and they begin to move and talk once again.

The movie shows Leonard’s rebirth. He was a smart and friendly kid (a prologue tells us), before the disease destroyed him. For three decades he has been in abeyance; now in his late 40s, he is thrilled just to move around and to be able to talk. He co-operates with his doctors. And he falls in love with a fellow patient’s daughter (Penelope Ann Miller). Love, and lust, are new experiences for him.

Dr. Sayer (Williams) is at the centre of almost every scene, and his personality becomes one of the touchstones of the film. He is cut off, too: by shyness and inexperience, by what look like motor-neuron problems he holds his arms close to his sides as if they are something not wanting touched. He really was happier working with those earthworms; this must be one of Robin Williams’ best performances pure and uncluttered by any ebullient distractions or schtick where none is called for; he’s just an adorable man here who gets to see patients who have had no hope for years suddenly sing and dance again with their loved ones.

But it isn’t that simple after a few weeks. The disease isn’t open-and-shut. And as the picture goes on we’re invited to meditate upon the weirdness and wonderment of human personality: who are we anyway? How much of this self that we treasure so much is simply good luck? Has our being passed through some neurological minefield unscathed? Which is better if you have no hope: remaining hopeless or having hope given back only then for it to be taken away again?

Oliver Sacks’ original book is as much philosophy as medicine, though it has been reissued since the film came out under its title: I read it afterwards to find out more about what happened at that Bronx hospital … What both the movie and the book convey is the unbelievable pluckiness of these patients and the absolute awe of their doctors, as they re-experience in a small way what it’s like to be born, to open your eyes and find out that you’re alive.

Watch Awakenings For Free On Gomovies.