Penny Marshall

In Awakenings (1990), Robin Williams’s Sayer looks uncertain, and Penny Marshall lets that uncertainty hold our attention. She is a director we value most when she leaves the actors room to suggest what their characters cannot quite explain. Miroslav Ondříček’s cinematography makes small changes in their faces count, while Anton Furst’s production design gives the medical work a credible setting. Neither contribution distracts from the people. That restraint matters in a film whose screenplay is so keen to make its emotional lessons clear.

Her feature debut, Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), was followed by Big (1988), starring Tom Hanks. With Awakenings, her attention to character served a medical drama. Then A League of Their Own (1992) took her to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Across her work, she returns to people hoping to find more fulfilling lives. Her habit of allowing melancholy into comedy, and playfulness into drama, helps keep that hope from becoming too solemn.

Robert De Niro’s Leonard Lowe gives the clearest evidence of what Marshall can get from an actor. His considerable physical effort sometimes makes us watch the technique, but he keeps Leonard’s individuality clear. We were moved by Awakenings because De Niro makes us want to know this man beyond his medical condition. Alongside Williams’s hesitant Sayer, he makes the relationship worth following even when the film is pressing too hard.

The reservation is what Marshall sometimes lets the script do to those people. Steven Zaillian makes the medical subject in Awakenings accessible without excessive explanation, but gives its emotional questions answers that are too tidy. Marshall does not entirely escape the habit of treating patients as problems for a gifted doctor to solve. We can forgive a fair amount of prompting when the actors are this persuasive, though we would rather not have to. See Awakenings for De Niro and Williams, with fair warning that the script will keep telling us how to feel.