Awakenings

“There is no such thing as a simple miracle.”

In a chronic-care hospital in the Bronx, patients have sat frozen for decades, victims of a rare disease. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams), a shy research physician, tries an experimental drug on Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro), the first to receive it. Penny Marshall, working from Oliver Sacks's memoir, keeps the camera close on two men learning, in very different ways, what ordinary days are worth.