Penny Marshall’s Awakenings (1990) is a movie that is hard to describe. This is partly because it is based on the real life of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote a book about his experiences in a chronic hospital in the Bronx. The movie focuses on events that takes place in the summer of 1969, when a new doctor (named Dr. Sayer in the film) joins the hospital staff. Dr. Sayer, played by Robin Williams in one of his best performances, is quiet, introverted, and shies away from physical contact. He spent the five previous years working with earthworms and is sorely lacking in clinical experience.
Dr. Sayer eventually becomes interested in the case of a man named Leonard and about a dozen other patients who all seem to be trapped by the same disease. It turns out that they are all victims of the “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the 1920s, which has left them immobile and unable to speak. In the film’s prologue we see Leonard as a boy when he encounters the first symptoms of his strange condition. He is played as an adult by Robert De Niro in a masterful performance as a man who has been trapped in his own body for thirty years.
The state of these silent patients appears hopeless until Dr. Sayer discovers that many of them will catch a ball that is tossed to them. It leads him to theorize about a body’s simultaneous motor impulses canceling each other out and spurs him on to find ways to break the deadlock. He is helped in his efforts by the gentle nurse Eleanor (Julie Kavner), who befriends Dr. Sayer and has faith in him even when he is doubted by his skeptical colleagues.
Leonard becomes the focus of Dr. Sayer’s efforts after he receives written consent from Leonard’s mother (Ruth Nelson), who has spent her entire life taking care of her son. Earlier in the film an aged doctor (Max Von Sydow) who has studied the cases of patients like Leonard states that “the virus did not spare their higher faculties,” because “the alternative is unthinkable.” We discover that he is wrong when Leonard uses a Ouija board to communicate with Dr. Sayer, referencing a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that effectively describes Leonard’s current condition.
After a new wonder-drug called L-Dopa becomes available, Dr. Sayer is able to prescribe it to Leonard, who eventually “awakens.” One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when a restored Leonard greets his mother. Randy Newman’s music gives us one of the best so-happy-I-could-cry moments I have ever seen. But observe Dr. Sayer in the background, the sole witness of this joyous reunion. As described by Roger Ebert, the movie has “sequences of enormous joy and heartbreak,” and how Dr. Sayer responds to them reveals the heart of his character, which is always at the center of the film.
It is at this point in the film that my role as an observer ends and my emotions take over. I feel empathy for Leonard, I identify with Dr. Sayer, and I begin to experience the same emotional highs and lows that they do. Penny Marshall’s direction of the film doesn’t call attention to itself, but quietly pulls the viewer in, absorbing us with its story.
After the success with Leonard, the other patients are put on the new drug which “brings them back.” Many of them have been “on hold” for years. It is hard to view this movie without thinking of the implications of what Leonard and the other patients have gone through. Think of all the mundane things we take for granted, all the “human connections” we fail to appreciate, all the experiences we have every day that Leonard and his fellow patients are cruelly denied through no fault of their own. One patient, played by George Martin (the actor, not the music producer), reacts in a way I think most of us probably would. “I feel old, and I feel swindled,” he tells one of the hospital workers. (Close observers will note the touching way his story develops.)
Leonard, on the other hand, is eager to embrace his re-introduction to life. It becomes clear to him that people need to be reminded what life is about, that we take too much for granted, that we have forgotten how good life can be. This happens around the time he meets Paula (Penelope Ann Miller), a young woman who comes to the hospital to visit her father. For the first time in Leonard’s life, love and attraction begin to take effect.
The Oscar-nominated screenplay is by Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for Schindler’s List, and also wrote and directed Searching for Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action, all of which are based on true stories. They are all stories about human nature that do not fit any standard Hollywood formulas and cannot be easily described.
The film follows the realities of life right up to the end, which is to say there is no tidy little happy ending. It is introspective, inviting us to reflect upon our own lives. We are also left to admire the work of De Niro and Williams, and to remember the characters we have grown to love and care for. Characters that remind us what “life” is all about.
