AWAKENINGS DVD

Such a wonderful, touching movie featuring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Word cannot adequately express my appreciation for this story and its beautiful portrayal of past patient care and reminds me to appreciate life and the seemingly small things, like being able to move and express myself.

One of the best movies ever- amazing and a true story!

Great

This is an old move with Robin Williams where he works as a psychiatrist in a mental hospital hospital an discovers a medication to make mental patients that have been asleep for many years wake up. Excellent acting as you would expect from him.

One of my favorite Robin Williams movies… and the fact that this is based true story makes it that much better.

A damn good movie worth watching

This is a really great movie. Highly recommend everyone to watch. Never knew it was a true story.

This movie stars Robert Di Nero as a catatonic patient in a mental hospital in the 1960s; Robin Williams plays the part of his doctor. It is a thought provoking drama that is based on a true story. From around 1915 to 1925 there was a worldwide epidemic of a disease called encephalitis lethargica. Although most people recovered, thousands died, and a small percentage survived but were left with catatonic like symptoms. This movie, based on the book Awakenings by Dr. Oliver Sacks, discloses how L Dopa, a drug designed to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinsons's Disease, helped "awaken" a group of encephalitis lethargica patients in the late 1960s. Although the movie presents only a small group of patients, actually there were thousands of victims living in institutions across the country in the mid Twentieth Century. The story line focuses on Leonard Lowe because he is the first to be given the drug and the first to experience its effects, both good and bad. I'm not going to spoil the ending, so wont say anymore about the plot, but I do highly recommend this film. I found it particularly moving because this is one of the few dramas I have seen where most of the characters are likeable and all are well-intended. Even doctors who oppose Sayer's proposal to try the L Dopa do so in the patients' best interests. The only villain here is the illness itself and the social conundrums it creates. For example, what is the appropriate protocol for caring for patients when no treatment exists? In the movie Robin Williams gives medication just because he thinks it might help...and in doses he hopes will do more good than harm. Is he right to put a patient at risk like that? Is it justified if the patient's situation is hopeless anyway? Another issue is society's responsibility to people who can't take care of themselves. Over the course of the movie it becomes clear that the encephalitis patients have not been in the institution ever since they became ill. It was only after their caregivers could no longer take care of them that they were admitted to a facility for the mentally ill although their diagnosis was not mental illness. Was institutionalization in mental hospitals appropriate in that case? If not, where should they have gone? These questions are not answered because no agreed upon answer exists. Instead, it is left up to the viewer to ponder and decide because there is no guarantee something like this won't happen again.