Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Oliver Sacks, Christof Koch, Paul Theroux, Temple Grandin, Jonathan Miller, Bill Hayes
Intro:
This affectionate film reminds us that we have lost one of the great ones.
To read Oliver Sacks’ books is to fall in love with him as a person, or at least as a warm humanist voice that exemplifies both curiosity and non-judgmental understanding. Certainly, the talking heads in this documentary – the people who worked with him or knew him professionally – all speak about his influential drive to infuse medical discourse with an attention to the primacy of the patient’s personal experience.
There have been other films about Sacks, but this one shows a more rounded picture of the popular neurologist. It goes into his childhood formation. It also concentrates a bit more on his coming to terms with his homosexuality and his wild ‘self-education’ as a young man in America.
Born into an educated Jewish middle class family in London, all his siblings were high achievers. Both his parents were in medicine, but true to their time they retained some very unscientific views about sexual preference. When Sacks’ mother found out that he was gay, she told him straight to his face that he was an ‘abomination’. Not surprisingly, this scarred him and his ambivalence about homosexuality, if not identity, lasted well into his adult life.
He did however, ‘escape’ to America, where in 1970s California he found the joy of an expressive and unashamed gay culture in the gyms and saunas. He also, by his own admission, took a lot of drugs. In an effort to outrun, as it were, his own sexuality, he took to riding his motorbike as fast as he could. Loaded with amphetamine and high on speed in both senses, he would ride into the night for hours at a time. We are all lucky that he survived.
His medical practice was the thing that gave him a direction, and in particular, his fascination with the inner life of his patients. He broadened his studies from straight neurology to more experimental forms of treatment and his time at the Beth Abraham Hospital gave him the insights that would inform his later work as a public intellectual. Like his school friend Jonathan Miller, Sacks was a first class writer and, as anyone who has read his many delightful books will know, he was able to enliven medical findings with the golden thread of great narrative. This affectionate film reminds us that we have lost one of the great ones.
