Lorenzo's Oil

This is hardly the kind of film one might expect from Australian director/M.D.-trained George Miller (the Mad Max trilogy, Witches of Eastwick), but all previous reservations aside, he does an admirable job of telling the distressing and emotionally charged tale of Augusto and Michaela Odone, a pair of ordinary people caught up in endless reels of bureaucratic red tape and medical non-knowledge when their 5-year-old son, Lorenzo, is stricken with adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a rare and ghastly degenerative illness that strips away the myelin sheaths that insulate the nerves of the brain. If all this sounds like the set-up for a dry, depressing, unintelligible MedFilm, well, let's just say that it could have been. Instead, Miller takes us by the hand and succinctly spells out the nature of the disease in easy-to-grasp layman's terms. The Odones, after all, had no medical training of their own; when told there was no hope for a cure and that the death of their only son was imminent, they plunged themselves into a seemingly bottomless well of medical knowledge in hopes of finding a cure. Abandoning all else (and after taking several mortgages on their modest home), Augusto (Nolte) and Michaela (Sarandon) basically enter into crash-courses of everything from biochemistry to advanced genetics -- their will to save their child simply outweighs their former ignorance. As the Odones, Nolte and Sarandon are in top form, looking haggard, haunted, and angry at God, Man, and Medicine (though not necessarily in that order). Nolte is a powerhouse performer: after the diagnosis, we see him in a stairwell, helpless and weeping in the grip of this sudden horror that is taking his son. Sarandon, likewise, is excellent as Michaela, self-burdened with the stifling knowledge that the rogue genes that ensured the disease were hers alone. Director Miller, thankfully, keeps his pacing quick and his touch deft -- Lorenzo's Oil rarely becomes bogged down in interdisciplinary conundrums or the unwarranted heartstring-yanking that so often occurs in Hollywood MedFilms.