Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6880 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-04-06
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English, Italian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 136 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
With this powerful 1992 drama, director-producer George Miller (The Road Warrior) proved that a movie about a disease doesn't have to be a typical disease-of-the-week movie. Based on the real-life case of the Odones family, the story concerns 5-year-old Lorenzo, suffering mightily from an apparently incurable and degenerative brain illness called A.L.D. His parents, an economist (Nick Nolte) and a linguist (Susan Sarandon), refuse to accept the received wisdom that there is no hope, and set about learning biochemistry to pursue a cure on their own. The film becomes an intriguing scientific mystery mixed with a story of pain, grief, and the strain on the two adults. In other words, Lorenzo's Oil is similar to all those medical-mayhem TV flicks but with some key differences: a pair of great actors in Sarandon and Nolte--who actually do some of the finest work of their careers here--and Miller's bold and typically inventive direction. Miller, a doctor himself, refuses to shirk from the chaos and horrors of a child's agony, and he makes us hear the death chains rattling behind images that would be purely sentimental in another director's hands. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte portray an extraordinary (real-life) couple named Michaela and Augusto Odone, whose five-year-old son, Lorenzo, is found to have an extremely rare, ruthlessly degenerative, incurable disease. Frustrated by the inadequancy of available therapies and outraged by the primitive state of knowledge about the disease, the Odones won't accept the inevitability of his fate until they've studied the disease thoroughly. It's easy to imagine the Odones' courage and tenacity processed by Hollywood into the sort of shrink-wrapped package of uplift that has, over the years, given the loftiest qualities of the human spirit a really bad name. But director George Miller, a former doctor best known for the punk-inflected "Mad Max" series of action movies, doesn't treat his characters reverently, and explains the data to us patiently, slowly, so we get caught up in the medical mystery. The result is an almost freak occurence: an inspirational drama that's genuinely inspiring. The honest emotion it produces out of what might have been banal tearjerker material is a small but real wonder. It gives human virtues a human scale. Also with Zack O'Malley Greenburg, Peter Ustinov, and Kathleen Wilhaite. Screenplay by Miller and Nick Enright. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Lorenzo Odone, who doctors had predicted would die in childhood, died one day after his 30th birthday
May 31, 2008. From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The man whose parents' battle to save him from a nerve disease was depicted in the movie "Lorenzo's Oil" died Friday at his home in Virginia, having lived more than 20 years longer than doctors had predicted.

One of my favorite movies of all time.
As a scientific researcher myself, this is a very motivational movie. It goes to show that medical science is not just about understanding immunology or breakdown of muscle fibers, but also about will and determination. Recommended to everyone.

Lorenzo's Oil
This is an excellent movie. I had to view the movie for a science class I was taking and it was very good. I probably would never have watched the movie if it wasn't part of an assignment...I'm glad I did!