AWAKENINGS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
Penny Marshall, the director of AWAKENINGS, has a way with actors, as anyone who has seen BIG will attest. The actors in this case are Robin Williams as a painfully shy doctor in a so-called chronic hospital in the Bronx, Robert De Niro as one of his patients whom he awakens from a decades-long "absence," Julie Kavner as Williams' nurse and supporter, an ensemble of wonderful character actors as other patients, and finally real-life patients in a real-life hospital.
The hospital is not ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST; sadism and power are not the problems when Williams shows up, albeit reluctantly, as the new doc-on-the-block. The problem is routine, lack of curiosity, acceptance of the received wisdom about warehousing the chronics, presumably untreatable victims of unknowable mental disorders. John Heard puts in an appearance as the stern, slightly cynical head doctor, whose job, it seems, is to rain on everyone's parade. (This is the same John Heard who played a similarly grim therapist in the Dyan Cannon movie I saw in previews earlier this last week.)
This is a movie that I think will stay with one for a long time because the story is so intriguing and the performances so strong. Williams discovers by accident that a group of patients who appear to totally out of communication with our world are maintaining slender threads of contact. He deduces a connection with an encephalitis epidemic in the 1920s and a possible cure in a new drug, L-DOPA (this being 1969). Williams experiments on De Niro, who awakens to find that 30 years of his life have disappeared. There is much of interest in the reactions of the patient and the family to this situation, the loving mother who doesn't really want her little boy to not need her, the man who finds that his family has disappeared in various way while he was "away," and so forth.
Williams plays against type and plays very well, with hardly any of his comic persona peeping through. He is never given a chance to extemporize, a la GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM, and turns an understated, disciplined performance. (Julie Kavner, his nurse, is her reliably wonderful self, just as we've seen in so many Woody Allen movies and elsewhere; but she is pretty much playing her same stock character, delightful as it is, in contrast to Williams.)
De Niro turns an amazingly detailed performance in a highly physical role of a man once total rigid like a statue, then gradually loosening up, learning to move again, then as the cure wears off, developing alarming tics and contortions of a body out of control. The only problem with De Niro's performance is that is De Niro, who may be too familiar a talent for us ever to forget that this is De Niro turning in another Oscar-nomination performance.
Some of the character actors that I would like mention en passant include Anne Meara, who was once, I believe, a stand-up comic, the late Dexter Gordon as the patient who will not or cannot speak except through his piano playing, and a particularly splendid Alice Drummond who has one of the best lines in the movie about knowing that the year is 1969 but needing it to be 1926 (the year she "went to sleep").
Some have complained that the movie suffers from an unnatural symmetry with De Niro trapped in his body and Williams trapped in his shyness and the two of them awakening to life, trying to help each other. I find this to be a thematic strength in the movie, the kind of quality that raises it above the disease-of-the-month club. It gives the movie meaning and resonance for all of us with message of appreciating life and having the courage to fight for it, a message not that different from the carpe diem theme of DEAD POETS SOCIETY, Robin Williams' second best movie to date.
I recommend AWAKENINGS. It is a strange and haunting story, excellently presented. You will very likely want to see more than once in fact.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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