PG-13 | 2 hours 1 min | Drama, Biopic | 1990
Director Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” champions the purposeful act of living over the submissive state of merely existing. Marshall’s film, based on Steven Zaillian’s screenplay, hints that if humans are denied humane treatment, they’ll wilt as plants do. Then, it doesn’t matter whether doctors try a new drug or up its dosage.
‘Awakenings’
Introverted and socially awkward Dr. Sayer (Robin Williams), who is more at home with plants than people, is thrust into a literal forest of folk in a ward for catatonic patients. That it’s called the Garden Ward does little to ease his awkwardness.Nurse Eleanor (Julie Kavner), who warms to his kindness, reassures and roots for him. The indifference of both the doctors and staff is as much the villain as the disease itself.
Sayer consults a senior researcher, Dr. Ingham (Max Von Sydow), who’d diagnosed the elusive illness years ago but lacked solutions at the time. Both men look at Ingham’s long-forgotten patients captured on film, their gnarled limbs and contorted faces flickering on the screen. Each patient stares vacantly, open-mouthed. It’s like they’re screaming to be freed from their fortress-like bodies.
Sayer wonders what such patients are thinking. Ingham dismisses the very idea that they can think at all.
Sayer persists: Ingham’s so certain “because?” Ingham shudders, “because the alternative is unthinkable!” And Sayer grasps how horrifying it is for a mind that’s alive to be caged in a deathly body.
Sayer’s eventual therapeutic tactics are intuitive, rather than taught. He’s spent much of his life studying plants, and wonders that if sunlight, water, air, and soil nutrients nourish wilting plants, what “missing link” can nourish withering humans. When cared for, plants grow, flower, and become trees, offering shade to other plants. Sayer infers, why not humans?
All ward patients get the medicine they need; they’re bathed, clothed, fed, and kept occupied. But some, abandoned by families, are robbed of a crucial nutrient: love. So Sayer reminds work-worn colleagues that patients are not animal-subjects in a lab; they’re individuals with unique needs. Some don’t start their game of cards unless a nurse throws the first card, while others don’t respond to music unless their favorite band performs.
Sayer’s excited when patients respond to a tossed ball or dropped pen, but their animal-like reflexes don’t satisfy him. He wants them to live purposeful lives instead of just existing. He wants to see self-awareness in their eyes and warmth in their smiles, which is why he risks his reputation and administers L-DOPA when no one else dares.
Ward inmate Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro) has been trapped in near-paralysis for 30 years. Leonard becomes a test case for Sayer’s idea: incremental doses of L-DOPA. Leonard’s doting mom, Mrs. Lowe (Ruth Nelson), visits regularly to offer a maternal touch that ward nurses clearly lack.
Due to the drug, Leonard comes to life again and is intelligent and sociable. He eyes a pretty girl, Paula (the lovely Penelope Ann Miller), who frequents the ward to read to her near-paralyzed father. Touchingly, Paula accepts Leonard as he is, even when he despises himself for his lack of muscular control.
Sensitive Direction, Superb Cast
For an actor so used to over-the-top comedy, Williams is uncharacteristically subdued, only rarely allowing the humor of his character’s social bungling to shine.De Niro doesn’t merely act like Leonard, he becomes him, mirroring Leonard’s pendulum-like swing between his command over his bones and muscles and his powerlessness over either. Even in close-ups of near-total stillness, he conveys shades of feeling: hope, despair, anger, humiliation, impatience, condescension, compassion, delight.
In one magical scene, Penelope as Paula embraces Leonard in what’s nothing short of an acting masterclass. She wordlessly conveys that she’s the one embracing him, and he conveys that he’s one being embraced.
Marshall’s execution is superb. Her lighting matches story moods. Sunny outdoor shots, frequent in the first half, turn scarce in the second. Close-ups of the lab weigh-scale and Sayer’s face show his desperation to pump Leonard with L-DOPA; he’s second-guessing, hoping for a miracle. As Leonard (convinced he’s better) tries to escape, a tracking shot, for just a few seconds, shows the bright hospital front door seemingly flee backward as we and Leonard are pulled into the darker ward corridor. And several of Marshall’s shots are from behind metal bars, and on doors and windows.
Marshall’s film suggests that when we’re locked within ourselves due to a catatonic illness or are withdrawn or uncaring because we fear rejection or failure, it is love, not medication alone, that can free us.
