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Dr. Oliver Sacks 'Awakenings'

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A moment of genuine humor in Penny Marshall's film version of "Awakenings" finds the ward nurses at a Bronx hospital for chronic mental patients annoyed at having to stop watching a soap opera on television. They happen to be surrounded by real-life events of a sort that soap-opera writers only dream about, miraculous occurrences alive with joy and pathos, love and laughter, courage and tears: all the things that give the phrase "triumph of the human spirit" a bad name. It need not have been so. "Awakenings," Dr. Oliver Sacks's 1973 account of the events that are seen here, is quite free of false sentiment, preferring to let the extraordinary facts of Dr. Sacks's medical detective story speak for themselves. The patients whose lives he changed …show more content…

"Thus these patients," Dr. Sacks wrote, "some of whom had been thrust into the remotest or strangest extremities of human possibility, experienced their states with unsparing perspicacity and retained the power to remember, to compare, to dissect and to testify." It was Dr. Sacks's inspired understanding of this state as possibly responsive to the drug L-dopa that led to the opening of what the film calls a "chemical window." For a brief period, these patients regained their ability to move and speak freely. Their wildly unpredictable reactions to this physiological windfall, as documented scrupulously and reflectively by Dr. Sacks, are what give "Awakenings" its potency as both a mystery story and a meditation on the limits of human consciousness. If Dr. Sacks's descriptions make impossible-sounding transformations sound real, Ms. Marshall's film very often has the opposite effect. Her "Awakenings" is a fairy tale forged uneasily out of facts, despite the facts' overwhelming strangeness and weight. "Awakenings" both sentimentalizes its story and oversimplifies it beyond recognition. At no point does the film express more than one idea at a time. And the idea expressed, more often than not, is as banal as the reality was

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