Wow! Such a good movie.

Simply A Masterpiece

I wanted to but couldn't!

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This film is a true story and like with all true stories we get a fantasized version of the story itself. We are dealing here with post encephalitic patients who have become absolutely catatonic. A new drug, quite experimental and that has not been tested really on humans properly, is used in a psychiatric institution where they have a dozen or so patients in that situation. First one patient, and then the whole group. The result is spectacular. They wake up and they start having a normal life, well normal is a big word. They just try to adjust to the reality they finally see and within the limited freedom they can have within an institution out of which they cannot go without being totally supervised by professionals. The first patient who was provided with the drug, Leonard, becomes very autonomous to the point of establishing a relationship with a visiting young woman and then asking for the right to just go out on his own for a walk. The film uses the word "miracle" too much. There is no miracle with chemical stuff and drugs. There are only physiological reactions to the drugs. They can be positive. They can be negative. They can last for a long time with a regular treatment or use, or they can only last a short period of time, an awakening and nothing else and then the patients go back to the catatonic state they used to be in and they may have spent thirty years in. The film at the end is not hiding this fact, but the term "miracle" is false in this context.The film insists on the reactions of the patients, on the way they enter a phase where they want to have some kind of real living, or at least what they imagine they would enjoy. The film is totally ignorant of a simple fact. These catatonic people are catatonic for us but they still can hear, they still can see, they still can enjoy the benefits of their senses and they know the standard language that is spoken around them. The film does not concentrate on this fact we know today, we would concentrate on today: the patients have heard a lot and seen a lot, even if they are locked up in an institution. But they have received a lot of oral language spoken around them and there is no reason to believe they did not understand it since they may have lost the power to speak, but we know with autistic kids who do not speak for years, that when they start speaking they start speaking normal language because they have learned and assimilated language while in their autistic non-speaking phase.We know today that it is important to go on speaking to catatonic and comatose people because they hear and they receive that language and they react to it, even if we have no external sign about it. It is amazing at times to find out that a person who gets out of a long comatose state is able to say what he heard and had saved in his memory during that period. It is not systematic. It is not automatic. It is not perfect and extensive. But it is, even if limited. Just the same way there is a womb memory that enables a newborn to remember what it was like in the womb, there is a comatose memory that enables the comatose person when he/she comes out to remember what it was like when they were "gone," and what was said about them.I must say that in 1990 we were still far away from what we know today. The film though is interesting because of the concentration on the people around the sick people. The family for one, at least one mother, the first patient's mother, Ms. Lowe, who is grateful while the awakening lasts but becomes dubious and skeptical when the awakening comes to an end, and Leonard, her son, falls back into the horror of a semi-catatonic state. The doctors are also shown as being over-cautious, and yet they are justified to be so but we cannot get out of the picture their refusal of a free walk in the city for Leonard as being a cause of the change in the "community" because the patients all knew about the rebellious state Leonard fell into afterward that also caused a relapse in his disease. The most interesting people are the nurses and other personnel. They are supportive of the change and the new experimental drugs because they want their patients to become more normal people, people with whom they can speak and exchange some conversation. That's the positive point. The medical profession is not necessarily of the torturing brutal unempathetic type. Somewhere they are still human. And that's maybe the most important "miracle." The battle for human treatments is not lost before being fought because the professional personnel in these situations or hospital wards just hope their patients' situation can be improved. So, a good film for a hot summer night.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

Greetings from Lithuania."Awakenings" (1990) is very moving, very involving and superbly crafted picture. Loosely based on a real story, it tells a powerful one, very simple yet very moving story - miracle if you ask me.Performances are first rate here from the great Robert De Niro and very good one from Robin Williams. Directing is superb - at running time ~2 hours this movie never drags and is highly involving from start till finish. Script by the great Steven Zaillian is also superb, not overwritten, not to much sentimental. Overall, "Awakenings" is a movie which after seeing it once you will probably won't ever forget it. This is a drama without any action, but it is done so good that its hard to stop watching it and admire. Great movie all around.

Hello readers. Lets's make a review about this wonderful movie. After 25 years I've never seen this movie. Happy I am watching it the first time This movie is one of the few that makes me cry. Very touching scenes and well emotional played. It seems to me like it was completely real. It's worth watching this Awakenings more times. I wonder the next time it will make me cry again. Please also leave a view also after your emotional feeling. Because of the minimum of 10 lines, I have to add three more line. Hopefully the are allowing this review. Next time I will be more specific with my writings. For us dutch it is not that difficult to write into English. Greetings from the Netherlands.

"People have forgotten what life is all about. They've forgotten what it is to be alive. They need to be reminded."Following the huge success of her 80's comedy, Big, director Penny Marshall decided to approach a much more sensitive and serious subject matter in her next film based on Oliver Sacks' semi-biographical book about his work in a ward with patients in catatonic state. Robin Williams was cast to play Dr. Sacks, although the character's name was changed to Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a shy doctor who prior to have been hired at the ward had very little experience working with patients. He was obsessed with researching and doing lab work, but those skills came in handy when he began treating the catatonic patients at the ward. He discovered that several of the patients that had been in the ward for decades had one thing in common: they had survived a rare form of encephalitis, but the disease left them in their current catatonic state. Most of the doctors believed there was no treatment for these patients, but he began to discover that some of them responded to certain stimuli. Not giving up on them, he decides to attend a lecture where he discovers a new drug that had been effective on patients suffering from Parkinson's, and he believes it might just help awake his patients as well. Casting Robin Williams for the role and having released this only two years after the commercial success of Big, one could easily have expected this to be a comedy, but casting Robert De Niro as the other lead easily put to rest that assumption. De Niro had also worked on Goodfellas the same year as this and he continued to be at the prime of his career. In Awakenings he plays Leonard Lowe, one of the patients who has remained in the same state for nearly four decades and who is still being cared for by his mother, Mrs. Lowe (Ruth Nelson), at the clinic. With the approval of the other doctors at the ward and Leonard's mother, he is chosen for a trial run with the drug. It doesn't take too long for Dr. Sayer to see the results he was expecting as Leonard seems to wake up from his catatonic state. The two begin to form a special bond and the positive results induce Sayer to test the drug on the rest of the patients in the ward in a similar way. As we become witnesses of Leonard's awakening we also begin to see life through his eyes as someone who feels he has lost so many years and now wants to enjoy life to the fullest. His awakening serves the reclusive Doctor as a reminder to begin living life and enjoying human interaction. There is a sub plot revolving his relationship with a nurse from the ward played by Julie Kavner, but the main theme is Sayer's relationship with these patients. Marshall's film was nominated for Best Picture, and just like her previous movie it also earned a nomination for the lead actor, De Niro. De Niro does a superb job playing this awakened catatonic patient, and it is evident that he did his homework and studied every single facial and body tic of the real patients. Sacks had filmed his patients in real life during their awakening periods and so there was a lot of material they had to work with. Robin Williams plays a much more restrained character than what we were used to seeing him do, so his performance might not seem as delightful as his other films but he delivers a solid dramatic turn. The third nomination that the film received was for Steven Zaillian's adapted screenplay which was powerful. He didn't win the Oscar for this film, but he went on to win it two years later for his work in Schindler's List. Spielberg said it was his adaptation in Awakenings that earned him the job for his film. This movie is emotional and touching without being manipulative because it sticks to the true story which was definitely one that had to be told in the big screen. http://estebueno10.blogspot.com/