Review of Awakenings (1990) by Spencer S — 09 Sep 2011

Awakening to the world after thirty years, lost youth, the incomprehensible loss of who you were in contrast to who you could be in the future, is a heavy subject matter. Luckily we have the extraordinary efforts of actors Robin Williams and Robert De Niro to encapsulate the spectrum of human behavioral science and emotion.

The aspects of the film that make it true are for certain the most astounding, drawing on the experiences of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, who worked with catatonic patients from the 1917-1928 encephalitis epidemic.

What is really very disturbing about the film, is watching fictionalized Dr. Malcolm Sayer come to the conclusion that these patients are in fact only sedate, and have the mental faculties to make a full recovery.

This is both good news for their future state, and devastatingly horrifying to think of their mental prison for the past thirty years, trying to communicate with the broader world but being limited by their own body.

We watch the good doctor bring back Leonard Lowe (De Niro), a child at the time of his crisis, and now a full grown man with the faculties of an infant. His transformation is subdued, nothing overall astounding about his awakening, since no one seems able to witness them when they happen.

He wakes from sleep, recognizes that he's back with the tender joy of a child, and remembers the death of his former state, but not the events of the past thirty years. As the other patients also awaken, and their journey begins, we're fed the horror of wasted life, the principle of the film to drive you into living when others cannot.

The premise was executed in a fairly original way, the acting was sincere and realistic for the otherworldly circumstances that developed from it, and everything is believable and neither sappy nor unenjoyable.

It's only the longwinded approach to certain sections that keeps me from enjoying it through and through, the lack of true depression at the very end, only the possibility for Sayer to finally live now that he's seen the worst of unused potential.

It's too bittersweet a taste for me when I've gone through the rigmarole of this film.