PG-13 | 2 hours 1 min | Drama, Biopic | 1990
Director Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” champions the purposeful act of living over the submissive state of merely existing. Marshall’s film, based on Steven Zaillian’s screenplay, hints that if humans are denied humane treatment, they’ll wilt as plants do. Then, it doesn’t matter whether doctors try a new drug or up its dosage.
The film is based on Dr. Oliver Sacks’s heroic attempts in the 1960s to cure a malignant form of sleeping sickness that traps otherwise active minds within lifeless (or rebellious) bodies. Sacks’s refused to see patients as mere necks, torsos, and limbs, and pioneered use of the then untested L-DOPA drug….