I think the first ten minutes of Awakenings are probably the saddest ten minutes of film you can remember. Of course, you'll always remember the compassionate smile of Robin Williams (though you prefer to remember him for his wackiness in Mork & Mindy)but it's DeNiro who steals the show.
But what is it? The fact of a life that is destined never to grow, that is somehow caught like the winter light in glass? The sudden entering into a different set of rituals..rituals of slow decline, a human being gradually becoming less of a human being as he is deprived of the changing seasons, turning points, various levels of awakenings? His friends are told something is wrong and he has a dim understanding that he's being dragged down and will never be part of their world again? School will go on, some kids will move out of town, time will flow, some will get married, die of heartbreak, fall, sing, but for him his life is locked in that one still moment-and it is not a moment of great beauty or grace or illumination.
Human beings love to carve into wood: their names, a heart, the name of the beloved...and hope to return to it one day, assuming it will last, imagining that the passing of time can be reversed, brought back.
'Och springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women inextremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.'
But what is it? The fact of a life that is destined never to grow, that is somehow caught like the winter light in glass? The sudden entering into a different set of rituals..rituals of slow decline, a human being gradually becoming less of a human being as he is deprived of the changing seasons, turning points, various levels of awakenings? His friends are told something is wrong and he has a dim understanding that he's being dragged down and will never be part of their world again? School will go on, some kids will move out of town, time will flow, some will get married, die of heartbreak, fall, sing, but for him his life is locked in that one still moment-and it is not a moment of great beauty or grace or illumination.
Human beings love to carve into wood: their names, a heart, the name of the beloved...and hope to return to it one day, assuming it will last, imagining that the passing of time can be reversed, brought back.
'Och springs us from the domestic into the disconsolate. It is a common, almost pre-linguistic particle, one of those sounds (that in the words of Robert Frost) 'haven't been brought to book..living in the cave of the mouth. ..If 'ouch' is the complaint of the ego, 'och' is the sigh of ultimate resignation and illumination. Here, an on the countless occasions when it has been uttered by men and women inextremis since time immemorial, it functions as a kind of self-relinquishment, a casting of the spirit upon the mercy of fate, at once a protest and a cry for help.'
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