Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
Ric Burns | US, 2019 | English | Documentary | 110m | DCP | IMDB | Distributor/Sales: Zeitgeist Films | Festival marketing sample: New York Film Festival 2019 | Trailer
Description: Oliver Sacks was born to Jewish Orthodox parents in London in 1933. Both his parents were physicians. During the war, Oliver and his brother Michael were sent to a boarding school. Oliver believes that the deprivations they both suffered there triggered his brother’s schizophrenia. While loving his brother, Oliver felt he needed to withdraw into his own world in order to protect himself from being sucked by Michael’s madness. After Oliver admitted to his father his homosexual tendencies, his mother, with whom he was very close, told him she wishes he was never born. Oliver resolved to suppress his sexuality for most of his life. His fascination with the classical literature of neurological case studies led him to choose that field and he emigrated to the United States.
Sacks’s first book, Migranes, was a study of the malady that has afflicted him for most of his life. Following an almost lethal encounter with a Norwegian bull while hiking, he wrote A Leg to Stand On. In it he described the odd sensation of his temporarily paralysed leg feeling like it did not belong to his own body. After an unsuccessful stint at research neurology, Sacks returned to medical treatment at a Bronx hospital. There he encountered patients left in a vegetative state by a sleeping sickness they developed during the flu epidemic of 1918. Experimenting with the then novel drug L-Dopa, he was able to return these patients to a state of wakefulness. Unfortunately, the drug’s side effects soon proved intolerable and patients reverted to their previous state. He described his case studies in Awakenings, written in his distinctive adjective rich and florid style.
That and subsequent works were mostly dismissed or ignored by his peers who suspected he might have embellished his descriptions. Moreover, Sacks’ classical case studies, in the style of works by 19th and early 20th century predecessors such as A. P. Luria, were unfashionable with contemporaries who embraced a quantitive and theoretical approach to neurology. Nonetheless, his next collection of case studies, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, became a best seller and launched his literary career. It appears that often there is very little Sacks could do for his patients to alleviate their suffering other than, perhaps, empathising with and validating them. It was only after the release of the Hollywood adaptation of Awakenings that Sacks began receiving the recognition he craved from his peers. Many other books followed. His success also spawned a whole industry of popular nonfiction literature by physicians such as Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Merits: This film was made with the participation of Oliver Sacks following the recurrence of his cancer in 2015, when he was informed that he would probably die within six months. Much of what Sacks says in the film appears to be read from his autobiography, On the Move. The film does offer some glimpses of his personality, though, as when he relates a particularly colourful recollection triggered by the consumption of a dish of Jello. Even those familiar with Sacks, though, will find much visual material to delight them here. There are many family pictures, clips from Super-8 films Sacks took of his post encephalitic patients’ and clips from The Mind Traveller, a 4-part series Sacks made for the BBC in 1998. There are interviews with friends and collaborators, including his publisher Robert Calasso, longtime editor Kate Edgar and his lover Billy Hayes. There are also interviews with two patients who embrace his interventions and rebut the accusations that he exploited their stories.
Rating: Sexual references, LGBTQ theme.