Wake Up Call

So how does Dr. Oliver Sacks feel about Columbia Pictures’ just-out “Awakenings,” which chronicles his dramatic success in reviving a group of post-encephalitic patients from their catatonic states in 1969?

“My reservations are very small, because the essential truth of that time was conveyed,” he tells us. “I’m delighted that the story of this event and these patients is being told again (there was a British documentary in 1973). These things were full of wonder at many levels.”

Director Penny Marshall’s feature has fictionalized much of Sacks’ own book, which recounts his work with patients who had been mute and virtually immobile for decades. Robin Williams portrays a doctor based loosely on Sacks, with Robert De Niro as his primary patient, who awakens after 30 years to a changed world and a challenging new life.

Sacks, technical consultant on the film, says that the actors--”especially De Niro”--meticulously studied footage of the so-called “awakenings.” De Niro “had an incredible empathy and (mastery) of detail,” Sacks says. “At times, I would get totally taken in and forget he was an actor.”

Sacks is generally pleased with the film’s depiction of behavior and events--”This was not a documentary or reconstruction, though it’s authentic in many ways”--but remains unhappy that De Niro’s character becomes violent in the film.

“My main reservation is the violence on Ward 5,” Sacks says. “I got very angry about it. In fact, I walked off the set.”

He was less upset when screenwriter Steven Zaillian created a relationship between the doctor and a supportive nurse (played by Julie Kavner).

“The nurse didn’t exist,” Sacks says. “She was an invention.

“But what is Hollywood without a little love and violence?”