Awakenings Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Awakenings Blu-ray Movie Review

A Medical Drama Without Glamor, Suds or Easy Answers

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 7, 2011

A film like Awakenings has to skirt countless mawkish snares. The very subject oozes sentiment: a dozen catatonic patients -- "statues", as the doctors and staff term them -- warehoused in a chronic ward are brought back to life, but only briefly, by a "Hail Mary" therapy tried by a doctor who himself is barely functional. Cue the violins and pass the tissues.

But Awakenings doesn't have that effect. It's moving all right, but its emotional highs rest on a hard-headed core of common sense about the vagaries of life and the risks we all take just by living. "When my son was born healthy, I never asked why", says the mother of one patient. "But when he got sick, you can bet I asked why!" By quietly (and often humorously) illustrating life's risks, the film slyly insinuates its lesson about appreciating life's gifts without ever slipping into Hallmark twaddle. The seemingly effortless simplicity with which the narrative advances, conveying vast quantities of condensed personal, medical and chemical information along the way, is a credit to the joint efforts of screenwriter Steven Zaillian (whose work on Awakenings so impressed Steven Spielberg that he hired Zaillian to adapt Schindler's List), director Penny Marshall, and a pitch-perfect cast led by Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, the latter giving the most restrained screen performance of his career (yes, miracles happen).

It's the early 1930s. A boy, Leonard Lowe (Anthony J. Nici), is playing with friends in the streets of New York when he notices tremors in his right hand. His use of his hands diminishes, to the point where the former "A" student can no longer write his own name. His mother keeps Leonard in his room, telling his friends that he's sick and can no longer join them.

Over thirty-five years later, in 1969, Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Williams) arrives for a job interview at the Bainbridge Hospital in The Bronx. Bainbridge is a chronic care facility for neurologic and psychiatric patients who are not expected to recover. Among them are a number of sufferers from an unnamed malady in which they do not move or speak, but are simply "absent". All of their files characterize these patients as "atypical", but as Dr. Sayer notes: "You'd think at a certain point all these atypical somethings would amount to a typical something." One of these patients is the adult Leonard Lowe (De Niro), brought to Bainbridge by his mother (Ruth Nelson) at age nineteen. His condition hasn't changed for thirty years.

Dr. Sayer is also atypical. A licensed physician, he has never treated a patient and prefers research in a lab. Dealing with people so discomfits him that, upon learning the position at Bainbridge involves contact with actual patients, he has to be strong-armed into taking it. (One gets the sense that qualified candidates aren't exactly bursting through the door.) So shy and withdrawn is Sayer that he spends the entire film ducking the obvious interest shown him by one of the nurses, Eleanor Costello (Julie Kavner, just as she was starting to voice Marge Simpson). Nurse Costello is moved by Sayer's unwillingness to fall into the routine of checking pulses, taking blood pressure and signing off on another week of "no change", which is clearly what the chief physician, Dr. Kaufman (John Heard), would prefer. But Sayer can't stifle his instinctive curiosity. Give him a ward of chronic patients, and he begins studying them -- and notices things that others have overlooked.

Dr. Sayer almost immediately observes that not every catatonic patient is entirely unresponsive. Some respond to specific stimuli: an object falling, a ball being thrown, a pattern of tiles in the floor. The patient with whom Sayer initially spends the most time is named Lucy, and she's played by long-time character actor Alice Drummond, whom some viewers may recognize as the librarian in Ghostbusters. Poring through medical histories with Nurse Costello, Sayer discovers a common thread: All of the patients exhibiting this behavior contracted encephalitis, a severe neurological disease, during an epidemic in the Twenties. Sayer's research leads him to a retired doctor, Ingham (Max von Sydow), who, in a brief and intense scene, explains how patients who recovered from encephalitis seemed normal but would be brought back to him months, sometimes years later with all manner of strange symptoms. He could do nothing for them, and the suggestion hangs strongly in the air that the medical community dismissed Dr. Ingham's diagnoses, preferring to treat such cases as "atypical" anomalies.



Fortified with a working hypothesis, Sayer searches for a treatment. Neuropharmacology was then in its infancy, and Sayer's research leads him to synthetic L-Dopa, a new drug for Parkinson's disease. At a symposium, Sayer asks the neurochemist who developed the drug (Peter Stormare) whether it might work for his patients, but the chemist brushes him off. After much pleading, Sayer persuades Dr. Kaufman to let him try L-Dopa on one patient, if the legal guardian consents. Leonard Lowe's mother, now an elderly lady willing to try anything for a chance to get her son back, agrees.

The drug works, and Leonard wakes up, as do eventually all the patients (who include Ben Stiller's mom, Anne Meara, and Judith Malina, who would go on to play Granny in The Addams Family). But that isn't the end of the story. The third act of Awakenings explores what it means to come back to life after decades of absence. It's a mixed blessing. As one patient (George Martin) says when asked how he feels:

Well, my parents are dead. My wife is in an institution. My son has disappeared out west somewhere. I feel old and I feel swindled, that's how I feel.

The most sustained exploration of this unique perspective is through Leonard, who is shocked when he first sees his own reflection. He's almost fifty, but when he last saw himself, he was nineteen. His mother still treats him as a teenager, which becomes particularly awkward when a girl named Paula (Penelope Anne Miller) catches Leonard's attention. Paula comes to Bainbridge to visit her father, a stroke victim, and Leonard gathers up enough courage to start a conversation in the hospital cafeteria. It's one of several relationships that Leonard is able to develop before the drug therapy begins to fail.

Robert De Niro received one of his many Oscar nominations for playing Leonard, but Robin Williams does equally worthy work as Dr. Sayer, and it's no more evident than in the scenes where the doctor is forced to watch helplessly as his patient struggles to retain the normal functions he's only just recovered. Against every expectation, Sayer has done the one thing he's tried to avoid -- he's made a friend. (The character is loosely modeled on Dr. Oliver Sacks, on whose book of the same title the film was based.) By getting to know Leonard, and indeed all of the formerly catatonic patients, Sayer has left the world of pure research and inadvertently entered the very realm of personal relationships that has terrified him until now. As Leonard tells Sayer in a late night conversation just before the L-Dopa therapy begins to fail, these are the things that truly matter.

Ever since Tropic Thunder, it's been easy to joke about performances like De Niro's in Awakenings as being award bait because they're not "full retard", but what De Niro accomplishes in his portrayal of Leonard is truly remarkable. Early in the film, the retired Dr. Ingham dismisses the notion that any of Sayer's patients are aware of what's happened to them, "because the alternative would be unthinkable". De Niro makes that unthinkable notion come to life in all its ghastly reality. He has always been a physically expressive actor, whether throwing punches in Raging Bull, posturing before a mirror in Taxi Driver, silently holding court in Godfather II or slumping like a pile of dirty clothes (in Quentin Tarantino's phrase) in Jackie Brown. For Awakenings, De Niro manages to portray Leonard as a cogent, lucid mind, even as his body betrays him, throwing his limbs in all directions, and terror overwhelms him. "Use me!" he cries out to Sayer during a seizure. "Learn from me!" Even in his apparently catatonic state, before the drug trials begin, Leonard is still thinking. When Sayer tries to help him spell out his name on a ouija board, Leonard spells something else: the name of a poem by the German poet Rilke that, when Sayer looks it up, evokes in graphic detail Leonard's inner world.

Awakenings Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Once again, Image has opted to fit a two-hour film on a BD-25, but since there are no extras of any kind and only one audio track, they seem to have gotten away with it. The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray does a splendid job of presenting cinematographer Miroslav Ondrícek's subtly muted period photography. Ondrícek had previously "done" the late Sixties in one of his several collaborations with director Miloš Forman, Hair. But that film depicted a colorful fantasyland, whereas Awakenings is set in a real place where funds are tight, upkeep is neglected and no one dresses to be noticed. Ondrícek and director Marshall don't resort to cheap tricks like magically brightening the frame or shining additional light on Leonard or the other patients when they wake up. They let the actors do the work of brightening the frame, and the character transformations are all the more convincing as a result.

Because of the setting and the nature of the original photography, this is not a Blu-ray image that will "pop", but it is faithful to the source and well rendered. The detail of the hospital wards and the patients' attire is fully visible, as is the detail of Dr. Sayer's chaotic home. (One glance, and you know he's a bachelor.) In the sequence where the patients take a day trip, the careful re-creation of 1969's street scenes can be appreciated down to the trashiest attire, and the dance hall where they end up stands out for being shiny and colorful. The film's grain is visible but never distracting, and the source material is in excellent condition. Black levels are sufficiently solid that the many night scenes in the hospital are dark without being murky or losing detail.

Awakenings Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original stereo soundtrack has been remixed for 5.1 and presented in DTS lossless. (Sony's first DVD in 1997 retained the stereo track.) Unlike some 5.1 remixes from stereo, this one has been done with care and restraint. The bulk of the track remains in the front speakers where it belongs, with the dialogue anchored firmly and clearly in the center. But subtle ambiant noises waft into the surrounds where appropriate, and sometimes they do a little more. For example, in a scene where Dr. Sayer forces open a window that's been painted shut so that he can escape from the hospital for just a moment, the surrounds accentuate the sensation by contrasting the suppressed environment inside the room with the much livelier surroundings that greet Sayer outside.

Randy Newman wrote one of his fine orchestral scores for Awakenings: sincere and emotional, but at the same time reserved and devoid of schmaltz. Newman is incapable of sentimentality, which made him the perfect composer for Awakenings. The DTS lossless track showcases his score to good advantage.

Awakenings Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

None, not even a trailer.

Awakenings Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Even though it was set in the recent past, Awakenings was made as a period piece, and one of the advantages of a period piece is that it ages well. The film is engrossing, entertaining and deals with important issues without ever becoming preachy. The Blu-ray provides an accurate rendition of the film, and the only drawback is the lack of extras. At current street prices, highly recommended.