THE TRUE STORY OF LEONARD LOWE AND DR. MALCOM SAYERS : "AWAKENINGS"

I know you must be slightly sick of me telling you how I coincidentally picked something up and it turned out bowling me away. You must think I am incredibly scatty and/or rather easily impressed (the former is absolutely true, the latter is not incidentally). I came across this film in the bargain basket of a big chain store. I always haunt bargain baskets, you have no idea what you might find there, I probably told you this but I once found the collective works of Jim Jarmush in a bargain basket. This may be the thing that prompted me to keep on looking in them… Anyway, I read the sleeve and decided to take it home purely because I thought it would make a good evening’s entertainment for me, my mother and my grandmother (yes, we’ve sort of become a family of movie-buffs over the years although I have to admit that I spearheaded the movement =) ) . I expected something rather sentimental and of good quality, but never, ever this. It just reinforces what I have always said, life itself, real life, is full of the most incredible stories and lessons. As one doctor’s battle with a mystery illness demonstrates.
Dr. Sayers (Robin Williams – I do so love it when he does serious parts, honestly I don’t think he’s a good comedian!) arrives at the chronic hospital in the Bronx in 1969 and almost completely by accident. He is a researcher more than anything else; he is shy, awkward and has almost no experience of actual patients and diagnosis. However, the hospital is understaffed and he needs the job, so there he is. As he tries to find his feet in the chaos of the neurology department he makes a rather surprising discovery. A group of patients, ranked as “living statues”, who have been living on the ward for almost 30 years in what appears to be a catatonic state. That is what everyone has been assuming about them anyway. But Dr. Sayers has the sneaking suspicion that they aren’t catatonic at all but in fact that they are conscious on some level, just incapable of relating to the outside world… His experiments and persistence leads to a trial with a new drug on one patient: Leonard Lowe (Robert de Niro), who has been “unconscious” since the early ‘20s. Excitement in the ward quintuples when the drug actually works and Leonard “wakes up”. He is slightly dazed and cannot quite fathom that he just “went to sleep and woke up 40 odd years later”, but he is back. Dr. Sayers sets to work waking up the other families and finding long-lost relatives who have given up on them years ago. The patients have to adapt to this new life and the fact that they have missed decades of their lives, none of them easy feats. Will they be able to adapt? Is their ordeal finally over? Dr. Sayers, Leonard and the others are about to learn that there is no such thing as a simple miracle…
I cannot quite describe how this film made me feel. I can tell you one thing though, although I don’t know from firsthand experience, I suspect that on an emotional level it’s similar to being hit by a truck. Just imagine it, you were living a normal life, young, happy, in your 20’s, maybe even younger with your whole life ahead of you… Then one day you get ill and get swept “out of the world” and you wake up 40 years later… Your parents and loved ones are dead and gone, the world has changed so much you can’t recognize a thing, heck; you look in the mirror and can’t recognize yourself you’re middle aged… Of course things like that happen all the time in sci-fi, we tend to laugh at it; there are two problems here though, first of all, the people in this case are actual people. As opposed to, oh I don’t know, Marty McFly. So they have actually aged. And that means they have actually “missed” an entire chunk out of their lives. They are aging, and dying.
I will not give details about the second half of the film, apart from the fact that it is truly heart-rending. One word of warning though, this is a real real story. That means, unlike Hollywood films with nice and tidy ends where all the goodies get what they deserve, in this end, some good and deserving people get bad stuff they do not deserve. The story is definitely bitter-sweet. But it is a testament to the strength of the human soul. And, as Leonard would like us to remember (this will make more sense once you’ve watched the film) how important the simple things in life are. Family, work, play. Going for a walk on your own. Having an ice cream. Going to sleep at night and knowing it’s going to be tomorrow when you wake up, not God knows how many years later. All those things you tend to take for granted in life. Things you never even thought you could lose… Definitely makes you stop and think. And be grateful.