I have a younger sister named Gina. Gina has had epilepsy almost all her life. As a family who loves her, we never know from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, if she will stiffen and have a drop seizure right in front of us, falling down the stairs or landing face first on the carpet (the latter of these happened over the weekend, causing the left side of her face to get severely bruised and reddened). Gina can sometimes have seizure clusters up to an hour at a time, sometimes they last only half a minute. Sometimes she will have over three dozen in one day, or sometimes she'll manage to go over two days without a single one. We can't anticipate when she'll have another one and it's caused us -- and her -- a great deal of frustration and stress over the past 19 years.
When I saw Lorenzo's Oil, I experienced a powerful story that can be transplanted into so many real world stories about ordinary people who have disabled, afflicted, or challenged family members. More importantly though, I saw how vital the struggle is, for those who fight for answers to help their loved ones. Take Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte's characters, for example. Augusto and Michaela Odone are told at the offset of the film that their child will most certainly die in a few months of a disorder known as ALD. They feel beaten. They feel helpless. But then they come to find out that the condition is so rare, so unexplored, that the reason the illness is incurable is because the science community has yet to really research how it works. So Augusto and Michaela learn everything they can about how it works. They go to health and medical libraries and do exhaustive research. They attend conferences and seminars. They poll other ALD parents. They even harangue drug manufacturers into developping a concentrated form of olive oil that may slow their son Lorenzo's increasingly rapid system shutdown. In watching them, I was reminded of how much research my own parents have done over the years about epilepsy. At home, they have web sites bookmarked. They researched the surgery Gina had back in 1991 and another operation in 1998 that put a magnetic device in her chest to reduce the intensity of her seizures. They write letters to government officials on behalf of respite care in the Maritimes. And then there's the strongest correlation between my parents and the Odones: my folks found out about a still releatively untested ketogenic diet about ten years ago, which involved increasing the amount of fat Gina has in her eating regiment (Lorenzo's condition was linked to the breakdown of the fats that protect his nervous system).
Lorenzo's Oil is unflinching in its depiction of a family forced to act quickly because every second counts. The screenplay, co-written by its director, George Miller, does a superb job of taking the layman viewer through the discovery of how ALD works. Surely the Odones must have been first-hand consultants on this moving project. The first ten minutes of the film are insightful as Miller incorporates distorted and lop-sided camera angles as the Odones go from specialist to specialist, praying for answers they never seem to get.
If you haven't seen this movie and are having doubts because it's "sad" or "too difficult", bear in mind that thousands of young male children around the world today are healthier because of the research and desperate work one loving couple succeeded at. And remember there are still many families who anxiously await cures to conditions without compassion or mercy. Indeed, this is a movie full of hope.
