Amir Amirani’s stirring documentary revisits the events of Feb.
It’s taken five years for “ We Are Many” to get to American audiences, but somehow the timing seems right. Contains strong language and discussion of sexuality and drug use. “His Own Life” is a compassionate, endlessly fascinating testament to that, as well as to the assertion, by one of Sacks’s friends, that the man’s placid acceptance of mortality offered a “master class in dying.” Unrated. That title is also telling: Sacks was a restless intellect, passionately curious not just about the quirks of the mind - his brother Michael was schizophrenic - but about the power of storytelling. Standard-issue talking-head interviews are interspersed with voice-over by Sacks reading from his 2015 memoir “On the Move,” shortly before his death. The life story of the late Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who revived the medical case history with such bestsellers as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings” - the latter inspiring an Oscar-nominated film by the same name - is told in the moving documentary “ Oliver Sacks: His Own Life.” True to its title, the film uses Sacks himself to tell most of the tale, from his somewhat wild youth to his coming out as gay in 2015, mere months before his death.
