OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE
****
Director: Ric Burns
Principal cast:
Oliver Sacks
Roberto Calasso
Kate Edgar
Paul Theroux
Jonathan Miller
Bill Hayes
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 111 mins.
Australian release date: 3 December 2020.
In this extremely frank documentary, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, Ric Burns takes us on a journey that is both enthralling and harrowing. Burns was approached to make the film only two weeks after Sacks received the fatal diagnosis that would end his life seven months later, in August 2015. The story is told in the 81-year-old Sacks’ own voice, recorded in interviews with the renowned neurologist and author, and is complemented by the recollections of his editor, colleagues and friends. This fascinating man holds back very little, revealing how extraordinary his life was. Born into a family of doctors in London in 1933, he repressed his homosexuality for many years and, when he finally came out to his parents, his mother said he was an abomination and not fit to be her son. This outburst set him on a path of discovery, not only about himself, but for those suffering with a range of mental difficulties.
Leaving Britain for the relative safe haven of the USA, he found that he had the capacity to communicate with patients who were severely mentally and physically disabled, exhibiting the most astonishing compassion and understanding. He was obsessed throughout his whole life, as he said in an article in The New York Times, with what it means “to be a sentient being on this beautiful planet.” That also meant experimenting on himself and he flirted with high-speed motorbikes and adrenaline, becoming a ‘speed freak’ in more ways than one for a number of years. In 1966 he moved from the West Coast to New York and began working as a neurologist in the chronic-care facility of the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, home to a number of patients who were suffering from a kind of ‘sleeping sickness,’ which left them largely immobilised. Experimenting with the drug L-DOPA, Sacks found he was able to ‘wake’ these people up for a time but, regrettably, side-effects caused the treatment to be terminated before a permanent cure could be found. Sacks wrote Awakenings based on his research at this time, one of many books he would write about his case studies, some of which crossed over into popular literature and became best-sellers. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is a case in point. This, and his many other incredible achievements, are discussed at length in Oliver Sacks: His Own Life.
Sacks’ work was not acknowledged by the medical establishment for many decades but today he is recognised as one of the most fearless explorers of the human mind, one who has influenced many neurologists in their search for answers. As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker put it at Sacks’ funeral, “In nearly all of Oliver's pieces, there comes that moment, that epiphany, that shock, when the reader realizes that Oliver was just as strange, and just as wonderful, and just as elusive as the person he was writing about. And there came the moment, too, when we his readers realized: so are we - so are we.” It was a fitting epitaph for this original thinker and empathetic human being, and Ric Burns has done an exemplary job of recounting his amazing life story.
Principal cast:
Oliver Sacks
Roberto Calasso
Kate Edgar
Paul Theroux
Jonathan Miller
Bill Hayes
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 111 mins.
Australian release date: 3 December 2020.
In this extremely frank documentary, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, Ric Burns takes us on a journey that is both enthralling and harrowing. Burns was approached to make the film only two weeks after Sacks received the fatal diagnosis that would end his life seven months later, in August 2015. The story is told in the 81-year-old Sacks’ own voice, recorded in interviews with the renowned neurologist and author, and is complemented by the recollections of his editor, colleagues and friends. This fascinating man holds back very little, revealing how extraordinary his life was. Born into a family of doctors in London in 1933, he repressed his homosexuality for many years and, when he finally came out to his parents, his mother said he was an abomination and not fit to be her son. This outburst set him on a path of discovery, not only about himself, but for those suffering with a range of mental difficulties.
Leaving Britain for the relative safe haven of the USA, he found that he had the capacity to communicate with patients who were severely mentally and physically disabled, exhibiting the most astonishing compassion and understanding. He was obsessed throughout his whole life, as he said in an article in The New York Times, with what it means “to be a sentient being on this beautiful planet.” That also meant experimenting on himself and he flirted with high-speed motorbikes and adrenaline, becoming a ‘speed freak’ in more ways than one for a number of years. In 1966 he moved from the West Coast to New York and began working as a neurologist in the chronic-care facility of the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, home to a number of patients who were suffering from a kind of ‘sleeping sickness,’ which left them largely immobilised. Experimenting with the drug L-DOPA, Sacks found he was able to ‘wake’ these people up for a time but, regrettably, side-effects caused the treatment to be terminated before a permanent cure could be found. Sacks wrote Awakenings based on his research at this time, one of many books he would write about his case studies, some of which crossed over into popular literature and became best-sellers. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is a case in point. This, and his many other incredible achievements, are discussed at length in Oliver Sacks: His Own Life.
Sacks’ work was not acknowledged by the medical establishment for many decades but today he is recognised as one of the most fearless explorers of the human mind, one who has influenced many neurologists in their search for answers. As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker put it at Sacks’ funeral, “In nearly all of Oliver's pieces, there comes that moment, that epiphany, that shock, when the reader realizes that Oliver was just as strange, and just as wonderful, and just as elusive as the person he was writing about. And there came the moment, too, when we his readers realized: so are we - so are we.” It was a fitting epitaph for this original thinker and empathetic human being, and Ric Burns has done an exemplary job of recounting his amazing life story.