Amazon.com Essentials:
With
this powerful 1992 drama, director-producer George Miller (The Road
Warrior) proved that a movie
about a disease doesn't have to be a typical disease-of-the-week movie. Based on
the real-life case of the Odones family,
the story concerns 5-year-old Lorenzo, suffering mightily from an
apparently incurable and degenerative brain illness called A.L.D. His
parents,
an economist (Nick Nolte) and a linguist (Susan Sarandon), refuse to accept
the received wisdom that there is no hope, and set about learning
biochemistry to pursue a cure on their own. The film becomes an intriguing
scientific mystery mixed with a story of pain, grief, and the strain on the
two adults. In other words, Lorenzo's Oil is similar to all those
medical-mayhem TV flicks but with some key differences: a pair of great
actors in Sarandon and Nolte--who actually do some of the finest work of
their careers here--and Miller's bold and typically inventive direction.
Miller, a doctor himself, refuses to shirk from the chaos and horrors of a
child's agony, and he makes us hear the death chains rattling behind images
that would be purely sentimental in another director's hands. --Tom
Keogh
