Lorenzo's Oil

Saw Lorenzo's Oil, a fairly dismal film by George Miller, the guy who directed the Mad Max movies.  It was about a mother, father, and son family where the son has a rare, degenerative brain disorder.  Because this disease is rare, not much is known about it.  Thus, it is up to the parents to heroically do their own research and try to come up with therapies for the child.  The film is fairly miserable and based on a true story.

It's fairly sad to see this poor boy turn into a screaming, barely mobile, emaciated shadow of his former self.  It's a sort of horror movie in itself: a child dying for no reason and with no way to prevent it.  The mother and father are heroic and saintly, suffering endlessly for the sake of this boy.  Interestingly, they involve other people in their misery.  There's a small parade of nurses who are fired for believing the boy should be allowed to die, or for believing that his brain is already dead, or that the mother and father are ghoulishly torturing themselves.  The fight is against all odds, and some level of self-destructive mania is involved.

The film also plays very differently in this age of Covid and anti-vaxxers.  The doctors are generally indifferent and haughty, ignoring the pleas of the parents in the name of scientific objectivity.  They are frustrating and unhelpful, but plucky parents doing their own research in defiance of Big Medicine feels very different nowadays.  There's a very moving scene where the father points out to the mother that trusting in the doctors is the same as giving up their own responsibility towards the welfare of their son.  This is true, and inspires them to do their own dive into the literature, but it could also have driven them to crystals or astrology or god-knows-what.

Also, the final nurse in the nurse-parade is an African teenager who the young boy knew in childhood.  This teen will not disobey the dictates of the parents and will not express concern for their welfare.  The film is based on a true story, so I assume that this actually happened, and was perhaps not so problematic in real life, but it looks bad, man.  The film was made in the 90s and depicts events in the early 80s when universal black enfranchisement was only 10 years old.  I feel uncomfortable questions would be asked about the main characters today.

The most absurd bit of this movie however is the father's ridiculous Italian accent.  He sounds like a fussy maître d', gibbering to research librarians "I neeed pay-a-pers on C-24!  Not a-C-12!!"  It's pretty silly.

Anyway, the film is okay.  It's uplifting in a sort of Erin Brockovich kind of way.  It's terribly sad at the start, but once it crystallizes into a race against the clock for a cure, it gets nice and gripping, full of frustrating lows and delirious highs.  Not amazing, but it has its moments.  An okay film.