Summary:

The sculptor Ken Harrison (Richard Dreyfuss) is badly injured in a car accident and finds himself in the middle of life permanently paralyzed below the neck and dependent on others for his care and survival. Ken is a strong-minded, passionate man totally dedicated to his art, and he decides he does not want to go on with the compromised, highly dependent life that his doctors, his girlfriend Pat (Janet Eilber), and others urge on him. He breaks up with Pat and fights to be released from the hospital, to gain control of his life in order to stop the care that keeps him alive and unhappy.

His antagonist is the hospital's medical director Dr. Emerson (John Cassavetes), who believes in preserving life no matter what, and so tries to get Ken committed as clinically depressed. Ken's attending physician, Dr. Scott (Christine Lahti), begins with the establishment but gradually moves toward Ken's position.

The film ends with the judge at a legal hearing deciding that Ken is not clinically depressed and that he thus has the right to refuse treatment and be discharged. In the last scene, Ken lies in a hospital bed framed by his own sculptural realization of the forearm and hand of God from Michelangelo's Creation of Man.

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This medical thriller begins with two crazed naked men escaping from an unmarked urban institutional building. One of them winds up in the Gramercy Hospital (NYC) Emergency Room under the care of the young Dr. Guy Luthan (Hugh Grant). The patient dies while exhibiting baffling symptoms and under suspicious circumstances. Dr. Luthan decides to investigate, against the advice of his boss, but with the assistance of ER nurse Jodie Trammel (Sarah Jessica Parker). Suddenly, police are breaking into his apartment and finding (obviously planted) cocaine. Luthan is fired by the hospital, his promising career apparently ruined by a faceless criminal conspiracy.

Still intrigued by the mystery patient, Luthan follows some street leads that take him to the Inferno-like caverns underneath Grand Central Station and the homeless people who live there. He is pursued by armed agents, is wounded, and wakes up in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down. Enter the prize-laden Dr. Lawrence Myrick (Gene Hackman), who explains to Luthan that he is trying to develop a medical procedure that will regenerate human nerve tissue and has been secretly using the homeless as guinea pigs. He rationalizes this practice on the basis of its huge potential benefits and tries to enlist Luthan on his side, explaining that his paralysis is temporary (but under Myrick's control) and in part an attempt to stir up Luthan's empathy for the patients who could be helped by Myrick's procedure if it is developed.

Of course, Luthan escapes from the bed. On the way out he encounters Myrick and his armed agents in the lobby, where there is one last round in the ethical debate before Myrick is accidentally killed by one of his henchman. Luthan's career is reconstituted, he is awarded a fellowship, and the film ends with Myrick's widow standing at the gate of the NYU School of Medicine giving Myrick's data to Luthan, saying that her husband was trying to do good but in the wrong way. She hopes that Luthan will use the data in the right way. Luthan smilingly enters a stone building with "Neurology" carved in the lintel.

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Summary:

Following the death of an aphasic hermit woman in the woods of North Carolina, it is discovered that she is survived by a daughter (Jodie Foster), a young woman who lives by herself as a kind of wild child, speaking a private language, and intensely fearful of human contact. The authorities decide that she must be normalized for her own good, but Dr. Jerry Lovell (Liam Neeson) disagrees, arguing that, although different, she is fine and has not asked for help. He insists on getting her informed consent before treatment. A judge agrees to give Lovell three months to observe the woman, whose name turns out to be Nell, and find evidence that she should not be treated against her will.

Lovell recruits a partner, psychologist Paula Olsen (Natasha Richardson), and together they set up an observation base on a houseboat with a view of Nell's cabin. From there Lovell makes a series of attempts to win Nell's confidence and understand her language. (Olsen for much of the film mainly represents a set of professional values more conservative that Lovell's unconventional therapeutic moves--which, for example, make her suspect that he is sexually attracted to Nell. Her own sexual presence, while downplayed, serves to defuse this potential.)

Lovell wins Nell's confidence (she calls him her "guardian angel") and the secrets of her speech and wounded psyche (a twin sister died young, and Nell has apparently at least witnessed sexual abuse). Following a court hearing in which Nell speaks in her own defense, the world gets word of her case and journalists descend on her remote cabin on foot and by helicopter.

Fearing that civilization will destroy Nell, Lovell arranges to have her hospitalized as the least available evil. However, when he finds her drugged, he sees that hospitalization is no solution, and he carries Nell out of the hospital and back to her cabin. He tries to make her understand that he is not her guardian angel.

The film switches to a warmly-lit lakeside scene five years later, when all problems seem to have been solved. Lovell and Olsen, who are married with a little girl, and several other sympathetic characters are picnicking with Nell near her cabin, and Nell is shown entranced and somehow emotionally fulfilled in being with the child, who is the age at which her twin sister died.

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Thirteen years into the epidemic, Hollywood's first mainstream response to AIDS premiered: Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. In an attempt to neutralize the inherent difficulties posed by the subject matter (a sexually transmitted and deadly disease) and the characters (male homosexuals), the director consistently described the film as an analysis of prejudice, while Tristar Pictures, which released it, confusedly promoted it as a film that was not really about AIDS or about somebody who had AIDS.

What the film appears to be about is Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), the rising star of Philadelphia's most prestigious law firm. Unbeknownst to his co-workers, Andrew is gay and has AIDS. When the truth is suspected, he is fired on trumped up charges of incompetence and decides to sue his former bosses for AIDS-based discrimination.

Nine lawyers refuse the case as does Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), an avowed homophobic and AIDS-phobic ambulance chaser. He later changes his stance and takes the case as a matter of simple justice although he remains steadfast in his prejudice against gays. With the support of his partner, Miguel (Antonio Banderas), Andrew takes on the system. He wins the case and dies the following day.

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A nurse enters an elderly woman's bedroom. "Wake up! It's nearly five," she cries. Does she mean five AM, or is it afternoon teatime? The nurse lets the window blinds unroll and puts some coal on the fire in the fireplace.

In fact, the patient is dead. She had died the previous evening, "by the light of the ev'ning star." Setting aside her "chintzy cheeriness," the nurse begins to pay attention. She looks "at the gray, decaying face," realizing what has happened. Her response is simply to straighten up a bit and leave the room. [28 lines]

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On a summer afternoon, the poet lies in a garden under a mulberry tree. The air is "swimming with insects" and children are playing in the street. He notices a housefly being caught in a spider’s web. The spider poisons and kills the fly, then wraps it in "lithe elastic," but everything else in the garden remains the same. Life goes on as usual. The poet then turns his attention to the future. One day in some cottage hospital he, too, will approach the end of his life. Will he groan in his bed and gasp for breath, while no one notices? [36 lines]

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Summary:

In response to hearing the dehumanizing proclamation that "bed number 12 has died," the narrator attempts to restore dignity to the life of a fellow patient by placing him, his illness and his death into a fictive framework. Having only very few clues to work with, the narrator eventually discovers that his story about the patient has for the most part missed the mark. He gains some solace in the end, however, for at least he made the attempt to understand a fellow sufferer's life and death, an act the doctors and nurses were unwilling to do.

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Summary:

The film opens with a bird's-eye sweep over the frieze of a post-engagement battlefield--mud, strewn with bodies and shards of machinery, all iron grey and relieved only by rare patches of crimson blood. Psychiatrist William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) treats shell-shocked soldiers in the converted Craiglockhart Manor. He is obliged to admit the poet and decorated war hero, Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), because his military superiors prefer to label the much-loved Sassoon's public criticism of the war as insanity rather than treason. Rivers is supposed to "cure" the very sane poet of his anti-war sentiments.

At the hospital, Sassoon meets another poet, Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), equally horrified by the war although he, like Sassoon, believes himself not to be a pacifist. A secondary plot is devoted to the mute officer Billy Pryor (Jonny Lee Miller) who recovers his speech, his memories, and a small portion of his self-respect through the patience of his doctor and his lover, Sarah (Tanya Allen). Vignettes of other personal horrors and the brutal psychological wounds they have caused are presented with riveting flashbacks to the ugly trenches. Sassoon, Owen, and Pryor return to active service. The film closes with a dismal scene of Owen's dead body lying in a trench.

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This is the true story of Christy Brown (Daniel Day-Lewis), who was born with cerebral palsy (CP) into a poor Irish family in 1932 and overcame severe physical disability to become a famous artist and writer. In his early years Christy is severely disabled and disfigured--spastic, unable to speak, and close to quadriplegic, able to control only his left foot. His father (Ray McAnally) initially regards him as both retarded and sinful, but his mother (Brenda Fricker) faithfully and heroically cares for him.

Gradually, as he begins to speak, Christy's intelligence becomes apparent, his father accepts him into the family, and he trains himself to paint with his left foot. In his Dublin neighborhood, Christy is widely accepted, playing football goalie (by lying across the goal) and being made King of the Bonfire on All Hallows Eve, and he at least passively participates in an adolescent game of spin-the-bottle.

CP specialist Dr. Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw) recognizes Christy's artistic talent and offers to train him. She brings him Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, gives him training in speech and movement control, and arranges for a one-man show of his artistic work. Christy falls in love with Dr. Cole and is crushed when she reveals that she is already engaged, and he tries unsuccessfully to slit his wrists.

Recovering emotionally from that disappointment, Christy in the years that follow sees more success as an artist and writes the autobiography on which this film is based--and, we are told in a closing title, he marries his nurse when he is about 40. (Christy Brown died in 1981 in his late forties.)

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Summary:

Don Wanderhope grows up in a Dutch Calvinist family, but his father is a searcher, always questioning the tenets of his faith and the meaning of life. Don's life progresses through a series of traumas: his older brother dies of pneumonia; Don develops tuberculosis; his girlfriend at the sanitarium dies of tuberculosis; and, later, his wife commits suicide. Despite all this, however, there is one shining ray of hope and love in Don's life--his daughter Carol. By the time she turns 11, father and daughter are inseparable pals.

At this point Carol develops leukemia. At first they think it is strep throat and she responds to antibiotics: "She feels a lot better. Give her another day or two and you can take her home. But, anyhow, we've eliminated everything serious." (p. 165) But shortly thereafter, while father and daughter are on vacation in Bermuda, she becomes severely ill again, and soon the diagnosis of leukemia is confirmed.

This begins many weeks of progressive spiritual suffering for Wanderhope, as his daughter suffers terrible physical symptoms and medical interventions. He is reduced to bargaining with God, and to begging at the shrine of St. Jude: "Give us a year." Initially, his prayers seem to be answered as Carol responds to chemotherapy, but then she develops sepsis and dies, "borne from the dull watchers on a wave that broke and crashed beyond our sight." (p. 236)

After Carol's death, Wanderhope vents his anger at God and becomes overwhelmed with grief. However, months later, when going through Carol's things in preparation for selling the house, he discovers an audiotape that Carol had made during her illness, a message that she had left for her father: "I want you to know that everything is all right, Daddy. I mean you mustn't worry, really . . .

(You've given me) the courage to face whatever there is that's coming . . . " (p. 241) The tale ends with Wanderhope's final reflection: "Again the throb of compassion rather than the breath of consolation: the recognition of how long, how long is the mourner's bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity." (p. 246)

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