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Jerry Lewis & Robert DeNiro in “The Nutty Awakenings”

October 11th, 2007 by Scott Marks

About an hour into Puny Marshall’s Awakenings, my imagination kicked into overdrive once again helping to make an interminable situation not only tolerable, but downright hilarious.

At 121 minutes, Awakenings makes The Decalogue look like a Mack Sennett two-reeler. The story is one of those sickly, feel good “the handicapable are better off than us” charmers that represents everything false and contemptible about movies.

It marked the first time I found myself laughing at Robert DeNiro. From Greetings to Jackknife, there isn’t a bad performance in the lot. Not all great movies, but none falter at his expense.

There was first cause for alarm with all those funny faces in We’re No Angels. Then came Stanley and Iris with Bobby D. playing an illiterate, something he’s far too smart to convincingly pull off. Both films were more bad than unintentionally funny.

Awakenings is both. It is worse than anything Steve Spielberg ever directed and almost as vile as Forrest Gump, yet I own a copy. (Admittedly, with the scan button I can give it the Reader’s Digest treatment and get through it in about 20 minutes.)

DeNiro plays a catatonic spaz who, through the miracle of a new wonder drug, becomes quirk-free until the meds wear off and he reverts back to his vegetative state. As his doctor, Robin Williams is near catatonic. It’s as if he gave DeNiro his bag of tics and promised to be a good boy for two hours. People were quick to confuse Williams’ lack of character breaking with a performance.

Somewhere in the middle of the picture, a light bulb turned off in my head plunging me into the darkest of places. The audience sat silently around me only to jolt when I laughed out loud at a long shot of DeNiro flailing across the floor. I remember thinking, “That’s the itching, the twitching and the jerk from Hollywood or Bust!”

If DeNiro learned anything from Marty it’s that an actor must look to past forms for their inspiration and who better a spastic mentor than Jerry Lewis? (Well, there is Charlie Callas, but he too studied at the fehoyvens of The Master.) The thoughts that follwed forever secured me a wing in hell. I knew at that precise moment, one day I would edit together a compilation reel comparing the styles of Messieurs Lewis and DeNiro.

This was put together in 1996. I’m in a much better place now. Yeah. Right.

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