Oliver Sacks: His Own Life - Neurology's late pop-culture hero turns out to be great and charming company
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Here’s something you might not know about the late English neurologist/writer Oliver Wolf Sacks. There’s the image of a man with a beard, owlish glasses and soft piping English tones, who wrote Awakenings (inspiring the Robert De Niro/Robin Williams movie), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , and a dozen other books of deep empathy about neuro-atypical phenomena.
Oliver Sacks: A mind that mattered.
But in his youth, he was kind of a hunk, a stud-muffin, living in San Francisco logging hundreds of miles on his motorcycle, downing handfuls of drugs and even winning who a California weight-lifting championship, between rounds of his medical residency. As Sacks notes in the film, his name represented his split personality: One part shy gentle academic Oliver, the other side “Wolf”.
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is directed by Ric Burns, brother of documentarian Ken Burns, and it’s based on Sacks’ memoir, which he published shortly before his death in 2015. Burns spent time with the 81-year-old author in his Greenwich Village apartment in the months after his terminal cancer diagnosis.
Sacks is interviewed, and reads extensively from his last book, often in the company of an entourage of assistants, editors and friends. The documentary also includes archival interviews from a host of journalists, fellow doctors, and high-profile friends (Jonathan Miller, Paul Theroux, Temple Grandin) that trace the evolution of the author’s career and reputation.
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Typical of PBS’s American Masters, the documentary is celebratory, though the eccentricity of Sacks’ life keeps it from feeling hagiographic. A number of factors seem to have informed his intensely empathetic interest in the personal lives of his patients.
One of Sacks’ brothers was schizophrenic, and Oliver feared he might develop the same condition. He was profoundly shy, full of self-doubt and bad at a lot of things (lab work, research). Though he put himself in every story he wrote, he also held secrets. He did not, for example, reveal that he was gay until the book he wrote, when he knew he was dying.
When he was 18, and told his parents – Orthodox Jewish doctors – that he was attracted to men, his mother responded that he was an abomination and she wished he had never been born. Then, oddly, the issue never came up between them again. He took a while to act on his inclinations, and then stopped again. Between his fortieth birthday and the age of 75, he was entirely celibate. In the last six years of his life, he became a partner of the New York Times-contributing journalist, Bill Hayes.
Those of us who aren’t mental health specialists can’t reliably assess how significant Sacks’ medical work was. But he was certainly the foremost popularizer of the mysteries of neurology, using the methodological model of 19th Century clinical case studies.
Sacks advanced the idea that we construct narratives in our heads and are defined by them. In his early days, his approach wasn’t always taken seriously by academics. (The English sociologist and disability activist, Tom Shakespeare, chided him as “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.”). But Burns’ film, through interviews, makes the plausible case that advances in brain-imaging have vindicated him, showing evidence that story-making is the essential business of what we call consciousness.
Above all, the film is affecting, not so much for what you learn, but because it’s a pleasure to share Sacks’ company -- the slow, deliberate pace of his speech, his humility, his mischief, curiosity and wonder. He had a deeply strange, high-leaping mind and you’ll feel fortunate to have known him.
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life. Directed by Ric Burns. With Oliver Sacks, Kate Edgar, Temple Grandin, Paul Theroux and Bill Hayes. Oliver Sacks; His Own Life can be seen through the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Virtual Cinema (http://www.hotdocscinema.ca) from Thursday, Oct. 22.
The film is scheduled to open in the following venues and through virtual cinema. Ottawa, Bytown Cinema, Oct 16, In-Cinema. Toronto, Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, Oct 22, Virtual Cinema. Toronto; London, Ont, Hyland, Oct 23, Virtual + In-Cinema; Vancouver, Vancity, Oct 23, Virtual + In-Cinema, Victoria, The Vic, Oct 22, Virtual + Oct23, In-Cinema