I don’t know if
you’ve heard of or seen this drama, but it’s very good. Robert De Niro has been
dishing out masterful and memorable performances for years, and in this 1990
movie, his portrayal of a catatonic patient dealing with coming back to life
after 30 years of being out of it is worth seeing.
His acting earned him a nomination for Best Actor at the 1991 Academy Awards.
The movie also got nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The downside of
this movie is that the makers tried too hard to make the acting and the story
feel too real. While that may work for some, a viewer doesn’t always want to
watch a movie and feel depressed—they want to feel happy.
Penny Marshall is a great director; her movies Big (1988)
and A
League of Their Own (1992) are forever memorable. I feel like the
thing she left out of this movie (comedy) was what it needed to become a
masterpiece and a box office hit (which it wasn’t). I spent most of my time
feeling sad and wanting to stop watching because I just couldn’t take the
gloom, rather than being excited for the patients who got to live again.
De Niro played
Leonard Lowe in such a moving performance that I almost broke down in tears.
Leonard was the patient Dr. Malcolm first tried L-Dopa on (L-Dopa is a drug
used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease), increasing his dosage
numerous times until one night Leonard got out of bed by himself and started
talking. After monitoring him for some time, L-Dopa was then administered to
the other catatonic patients suffering from Encephalitis lethargica, and they
too came back to life.
Things started
to change when the drug began to affect Leonard. He started behaving
erratically, becoming harder to control and a nuisance to himself and others.
Leonard eventually calmed down and allowed the doctors to use him to study the
effects of the drug.
The late Robin
Williams also delivered a great performance as British neurologist Oliver
Sacks, fictionalized here as an American doctor named Malcolm Sayer. The movie
is based on a 1973 memoir of the same name, where Oliver Sacks documents the
effects of L-Dopa on catatonic patients with Encephalitis lethargica.
I can bet everyone involved in this movie would have been pleased because the screenplay is very inviting and entertaining. We get to watch a doctor care so much about his patients that he does everything he can to bring them back from their catatonic state.
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