Taglines: There is no such thing as a simple miracle.
Awakenings movie storyline. 1969. Dr. Malcolm Sayer is hired as a clinical physician at a psychiatric hospital in the Bronx, despite he only having a research background. The job is not ideal on his side as he has difficulties relating to people which is the reason he has focused on research projects not involving human subjects, while the hospital hires him somewhat out of desperation in not finding anyone else with the qualifications who wants the job.
Most of his patients are in a semi-catatonic state and are housed in what some of the orderlies coin the “garden” ward, where all they can do for the patients is water and feed them. He notices that some of the patients, despite their generally catatonic state, respond in unusual ways to certain stimuli. In doing some research, he also finds that some common bonds between these patients are that they suffered from encephalitis in the 1920s or 1930s, and that their physical states are like they have Parkinson’s disease frozen in time.
Awakenings is a 1990 American drama film based on Oliver Sacks’s 1973 memoir of the same title. It tells the true story of British neurologist Oliver Sacks, fictionalized as American Malcolm Sayer (portrayed by Robin Williams), who, in 1969, discovered beneficial effects of the drug L-Dopa. He administered it to catatonic patients who survived the 1917–28 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. Leonard Lowe (played by Robert De Niro) and the rest of the patients were awakened after decades of catatonia and have to deal with a new life in a new time. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards.
Directed by Penny Marshall, the film was produced by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, who first encountered Sacks’s book as undergraduates at Yale University and optioned it a few years later. Awakenings stars Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, Julie Kavner, Ruth Nelson, John Heard, Penelope Ann Miller, and Max von Sydow. The film features a non-speaking cameo from jazz musician Dexter Gordon (who died before the film’s release) and then-unknowns Bradley Whitford, Peter Stormare, and Vincent Pastore play a doctor, neurochemist, and psych-ward patient, respectively. Also, a then-unknown Vin Diesel appeared, uncredited, in the film playing a psych-ward orderly.
Awakenings (1990)
Directed by: Penny Marshall
Starring: Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, Julie Kavner, Ruth Nelson, John Heard, Penelope Ann Miller, Alice Drummond, Judith Malina, Anne Meara
Screenplay by: Steven Zaillian
Production Design by: Anton Furst
Cinematography by: Miroslav Ondrícek
Film Editing by: Battle Davis, Gerald B. Greenberg
Costume Design by: Cynthia Flynt
Set Decoration by: George DeTitta Jr.
Art Direction by: Bill Groom
Music by: Randy Newman
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: December 22, 1990
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