When Oliver Sacks, the well-known neurologist and prolific author whose 1973 memoir Awakenings inspired the award-winning 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, was diagnosed with terminal cancer early in 2015, he decided to devote his final months not only to his friends but also to composing an extraordinarily revealing autobiography. That project resulted in the book On the Move: A Life as well as this documentary by Ric Burns, to whom Sacks gave a series of interviews, many with colleagues and friends in attendance, in his last weeks. Articulate and engaging, exhibiting razor-sharp wit and a whimsically self-deprecatory manner, Sacks discusses his clinical work, in which he demonstrated enormous empathy with all his patients, most famously, but certainly not exclusively, in his administration of L-DOPA to victims left comatose for decades by the encephalitis lethargic epidemic of the 1920s—the subject of Awakenings, here vividly recounted in Sacks’ recollections and moving archival footage.
While his passionate professional efforts in that and other cases is well conveyed, however, it is what Burns’ film reveals about the doctor’s own life that is in many respects most revelatory. He was born in Britain to Orthodox Jewish parents in 1933, and studied medicine at Oxford; one of his brothers was schizophrenic. When Oliver told his mother he was gay, she declared him an abomination. That prompted him to leave for America, where he gave himself over to bodybuilding, motorcycles, and recreational drug use that resulted in serious addiction. Ultimately he sought therapy, and though psychological demons remained—afraid that he invited rejection by being attracted to straight men, he says he remained celibate for three-and-a-half decades—he began his tenure in the chronic care facility at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, where he undertook the groundbreaking neurological work that brought him popular recognition, though even then he remained an outsider in his field, his work often dismissed as a curiosity.
He achieved a rapprochement with his mother, who assisted him in his writing during a return visit to England; analyzed his own recovery from a leg injury with the same empathy with which he treated his patients; and eventually found a life partner in photographer Billy Hayes late in life. Sacks discusses all this with uncommon honesty, and Burns presents it elegantly, integrating comments from colleagues and friends like Hayes, Jonathan Miller, and Paul Theroux skillfully into the mix. His Own Life—a subtitle that cleverly plays on his incisive, sympathetic portraits of the lives of his patients—is an excellent portrait of a remarkable man. Highly recommended. Aud: P, C.