catatonia

"My name is Leonard Lowe. It has been explained to me that I have been away for some time.
I'm back."



i hate touchy-feely things. i'm through with stuff like that. being touchy-feely when one is young is okay. wanting to paint the world with rainbow colors is okay, but only up to a certain age. one can't see life through rose-hued glasses all the time, for all eternity. youth fades and washes away idealism and all the things one would have learned in kindergarten. one grows old - one morning he wakes up, and bam! he's jaded.


i should know. it has happened to me. my take on it? well, cynicism is cool. it allows one to detach from the world around him, therefore giving him space to look at things objectively - without biases, without the usual emotional crap which i am so sick of because i used to get pretty emotional when i was younger. now i'm just angry and bored.

this morning i sat through awakenings, a movie about post-emphysemic patients who have been catatonic for twenty or so years of their lives, and almost died from restraining myself from crying. it was not enough that robin williams was in the film as the nerdy dr. malcolm sayer (i have loved williams since i was a kid, and though i am older and jaded now, i guess some habits are really hard to break) who went against the hospital's view that their patients with sleeping sickness were incurable and were going to stay like vegetables till they expire. robert de niro had to be leonard lowe, the patient who gets to be dr. sayer's "guinea pig" that would spark hope that there is, after all, a cure to the disease.

i admit that the fact that dr. sayer, a neurologist who never had any previous hospital experience ( the only achievement he could ever lay claim to was that he proved that myelin could never be extracted from earthworms - and i have to chuckle every time i remember this), wanted to make a change in the lives of the psychiatric ward patients in a hospital in the Bronx was a bit sappy, but the sentimentality worked for, not against the film. robbie williams played dr. sayer with just the right amount of hesitation, eagerness, excitement, and fear, which was a perfect match to robert de niro's stirring performance as the catatonic leonard who awakens for the first time after being "asleep" for twenty (thirty?) years. to say that de niro's portrayal of someone who sees the world for the first time is superb is an understatement, because de niro did not portray the role. de niro was leonard lowe. de niro made me feel how leonard did when he, again, after many years, holds a pen in his hand to write his name, or when he sees his face in the mirror for the first time (the last time he saw himself in the mirror was when he was eleven or so), or when he spends an afternoon with a girl (whose father was in the same hospital) he has began to fall in love with, or when he has to sit with the doctors and ask if he could go out of the hospital alone, just to take a walk. how refreshing it was to watch leonard look at the world with the wide-eyed wonder of a five year old kid being brought to the zoo for the first time, and how heartwrenching to see him (and the other patients as well) revert to his uncontrolled spasms and tics, as the drug's (which dr. sayer administered to him and the others) effects wears out.

the most haunting scene is that where leonard realizes that his "awakening" time is up and that he has to say goodbye to this girl he has fallen in love with. he meets her for lunch, and tries despairingly and unsuccessfully to talk straight and control his spasms. he takes her hand and they dance in the cafeteria - their first and last dance - as she holds him the spasms stop, and for a very brief moment the whole world seems to stop, too. i wanted to stop the film right there, and just have the girl hold leonard, and make him stop hurting.

but the dvd spun on, leonard and the others went back to being catatonic, and i went back to my old, ranting, angry self.

heck.