“Lorenzo’s Oil” (1992) is a true story about a married couple’s (Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon) refusal to wait for doctors’ and science’s snail-like progress to save their son (Zack O'Malley Greenburg) from the rare disease adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD).
Released during the early ‘90s when the AIDS epidemic was at the height of its reign of terror, the film more than subtly commented on science’s slow response to that epidemic. It attempts to portray how modern Western medicine and its foot-dragging is inextricably linked to Big Pharma, to the vast detriment of sufferers around the globe.
What Is ALD?
The year is 1983, and 5-year-old Lorenzo Odone’s worsening tantrums at school are initially misdiagnosed. As time passes, his mood swings and self-destructive behavior intensify, and it becomes apparent that the Odone family is dealing with an illness that doctors can’t figure out.Adrenoleukodystrophy is basically inherited by young boys from their mothers, who function as unwitting carriers with a 50–50 chance of passing on the disease. The disease causes a gradual and fairly horrible degeneration until death, which takes about two years following diagnosis.
Augusto and Michaela (Nolte, Sarandon) confer with a medical professor (Peter Ustinov), an ALD specialist, but rapidly tire of his dot-all-the-I’s-and-cross-all-the-T’s-in-the-name-of-science approach. However, they do opt to allow Lorenzo to become a subject in an ALD experimental treatment. Soon, though, with doctors and nurses bandying about time frames like seven years to expect results, the Odones jettison their passive approach and roll up their own sleeves.
Lorenzo’s Oil
Augusto gets neck-deep in the local library, medical journals spread everywhere, tracking down a cure. Michaela joins him in study. She also tends to Lorenzo’s deteriorating ability to swallow, learning to keep his trachea clear of moisture so as to avoid horrendously debilitating coughing attacks.They end up in an ongoing battle with both the medical establishment and other parents of ALD children. But after a few years, they make some progress by helping to develop the titular oil that lessens symptoms and brings hope.
The Right Director
“Lorenzo’s Oil” was directed and co-written by George Miller of the “Mad Max” films, who previously directed Sarandon in “The Witches of Eastwick.” Miller was uniquely qualified to direct “Lorenzo’s Oil,” being a medical doctor himself, with the ability to break the stultifying medical jargon and science down into a layman friendly narrative.The performances are all very fine, which includes the six child actors who play Lorenzo at various life stages. The casting of the exceedingly Scots-Irish-German Nick Nolte as an Italian is a bit flabbergasting; it results in Nolte speaking fairly quietly early on, because as an actor, trying to pull off a strong Italian accent with the requisite hand gesticulations when that’s not your bread and butter is rather daunting. Eventually, though, he sheds his caution to portray a man passionate about rescuing his son, and the slightly jarring discord of miscasting is swept aside.
Science and Human Disease
The Western world realizes more and more the limitations of Western science and its devotion to glacially paced, minuscule steps in the name of measuring-measuring-measuring, while ignoring common sense. The fact that all this is driven solely by technological competition becomes ever more apparent.“One thing that never gets emphasized enough in science, or in schools, or anywhere else, is that no matter how fancy-schmancy your statistical technique, the output is always a probability level (a P-value), the ”significance” of which is left for you to judge... Statistics, and therefore science, can only advise on probability—they cannot determine The Truth. ...
“None of this gets through to the news pages. When pitching a science story to a news editor, a science correspondent soon learns that the answer that gets airtime is either ”yes“, or ”no". Either the Voyager space probe has left the solar system, or it hasn’t. To say that it might have done and attach statistical caveats is a guaranteed turn-off.”