Awakenings

Penny Marshall’s Awakenings is a moving medical drama that occasionally seems worried we might remain dry-eyed. Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Oliver Sacks’s account concerns catatonic patients and the hope offered by L-DOPA, material that hardly needs extra encouragement to be affecting. Marshall approaches it with patience and a willingness to take tenderness seriously. We recommend it for the performances, with reservations about how neatly the writing arranges experiences that ought to remain difficult.

Robin Williams plays Malcolm Sayer with a hesitancy that makes his attention to Leonard Lowe persuasive. He gives listening as much importance as speaking, and does not make concern look like an accomplishment for which his character expects thanks. Opposite him, Robert De Niro makes Leonard a demanding physical presence even when movement is limited. The acting asks us to watch closely for a response, and that concentration gives their relationship more force than the passages which explain its importance.

We were moved by the effort to reach Leonard, more than we expected to be. De Niro’s stillness and Williams’s attentive reactions make the possibility of contact feel urgent without requiring a speech about the value of life. At these moments Marshall trusts the actors, and the film is better for it. Julie Kavner, as Eleanor Costello, contributes a quieter kind of warmth, welcome in a film with so much feeling to manage.

Miroslav Ondříček’s cinematography keeps faces clear and readable, which matters in a drama built around the search for a response. Anton Furst’s production design makes the medical surroundings convincing, though the polished finish can make the experience feel a little too safely contained. Editors Battle Davis and Gerald B. Greenberg give the actors time to register thought before pressing on. The measured pacing is useful; it lets us notice the people before the script tells us what to learn from them.

Randy Newman’s score sometimes presses too hard. Its warmth is attractive, but the emotional emphasis occasionally arrives before the acting has finished doing the work, and we felt nudged where we had already been persuaded. Zaillian has a similar habit of making the significance of an encounter too easy to grasp. That insistence narrows the patients’ experiences to the feelings the film wants to produce in the rest of us.

Most critics disagree with us, judging the sentimentality more damaging than we do. We think the central performances are too attentive to dismiss the film as merely an exercise in producing tears. The complaint about the patients has more force: those outside the central relationship are not given enough individuality, and the film sometimes turns illness into a lesson for the people observing it. That is a familiar weakness in medical dramas, and Marshall does not entirely avoid it.

Awakenings works best when it stays with the uncertainty of reaching someone and leaves the larger conclusions alone. Its patience is worth something, even when the script is busy trying to make that patience instructive. At 120 minutes, it asks for an evening in which small changes of expression can count as events. Give it that attention if this kind of humane drama appeals, and be prepared to forgive the music for telling us what we have already felt.