FILM / Oil on troubled waters: Lorenzo's Oil (12)

The film genre that deals with ordeals of illness has a social-conscience side to it - raising public awareness of particular medical conditions - but it has stronger affinities with the horror film. By being shown extreme versions of mortality we are allowed to think of our own more prosaic fatedness as optional. That's why the disease in question tends to be rare, in films that convert unacknowledged fears into artificial sympathy (Mask, say, or Awakenings). So Adrenoleukodystrophy - ALD - a congenital disease that had only been identified for a few years before five-year-old Lorenzo Odone was diagnosed with it in 1984, a condition too rare to attract much in the way of research dollars, should be the perfect candidate for a bracing weepy, the sort of film that encourages viewers to feel there but for the grace of God . . . - code in this context for I'm all right, Jack, and much better for having given my tear ducts an aerobic workout.

Lorenzo's Oil (12), directed by George Miller, is a great deal more intelligent, ambitious and uncomfortable than that. For one thing, Lorenzo's parents didn't simply undergo the emotional trauma of having a child diagnosed with a terminal illness: they made themselves masters of ALD as a subject, and they came up with not one but two therapeutic breakthroughs. But perhaps more important than that is the route that Miller in his script (written with Nick Enright) has chosen to take through the material.

When Augusto and Michaela Odone were contacted by an ALD support group, it took them some while to realise that they were essentially being offered bereavement counselling. The assumption was that Lorenzo's illness had happened to them, that they were losing him, not that he was losing the world. The screenplay respects the Odones' anger at this distortion, and in its opening sequences daringly shows Lorenzo in east Africa, the year before his diagnosis, dealing with the world on equal terms. We are shown the fully socialised child before we meet his parents, and in fact he acts as our guide, giving information - that his mother and her sisters all have red hair, for instance, 'Murphy hair' - which comes in handy later on, when we meet the tribe. Right from the start the film resists the assumption, so pervasive that its absence here is shocking, of there being, for a young child, no world beyond the family.

As Lorenzo does slowly lose his world, Miller doesn't fall back consistently on the parents' point of view. Sometimes other people's preoccupations are superimposed on theirs, as when a boy in the early stages of the same illness watches as Lorenzo is helped downstairs. This happens to be the moment when Michaela realises she can no longer understand her son's attempts at speech, but even such a hideous turning point is not allowed to supersede the other perspective, no less real for being outside the family circle.

The paradoxical result of our not being forced into the place of the parents is that we willingly participate in an extraordinary range of emotions. There is no whitewash in Susan Sarandon's outstanding performance as Michaela; suffering makes her monstrous in certain respects, a possibility from which the movies habitually shield us. Michaela loses her 'Catholic' faith, and we are allowed to see that this is an oddly specific event. It isn't simply that the sufferings of the innocent make her turn her back on God, but that ALD - which is transmitted exclusively by mothers to sons - cruelly parodies the couple that is at the heart of her faith's imagery, the Madonna cradling her child.

George Miller came to notice as a director of hyperbolic action films (the Mad Max movies) but also trained and practised as a doctor, and he doesn't allow the story to become a jeremiad against an uncaring scientific establishment. He uses religious music in a way that is jarring without seeming wrong - Russian choirs to accompany medical tests - though he also relies too much on Barber's Adagio. There should be a 10-year moratorium on the use of this particular piece on film soundtracks: its grieving lushness has been over-exploited to pimp for tears, and Lorenzo's Oil earns its tears honestly.

When Michaela loses her faith, Miller stops showing us churches, but the way he films medical libraries makes it clear that for him these too are sacred spaces, ecumenical cathedrals of knowledge. There are elements of fairy-tale in the story which no one would dare invent, and which make an odd impact even when attested. The first breakthrough that Augusto Odone - an Italian who loved to cook - stumbled on in his researches involved a form of purified olive oil, while the second involved the fractionation of another edible oil, made from rape-seed. In Lorenzo's Oil, a scene of family reconciliation takes place over a plate of appetisingly dressed salad that is also an unparalleled kitchen experiment in manipulating body chemistry.

The real Augusto insisted on being portrayed as the Italian he is, which means that Nick Nolte goes in for a lot of unconvincing body language. Some actors were just not built for expressiveness of that sort: it's as baffling as watching Robert Mitchum on speed. Miller does Nolte no favours in early scenes by filming him and Sarandon side by side in the same shot, since he needs to work his way obliquely towards emotion, while she dives right in.

The fairy-tale aspect resurfaces in the strange internationalism of the story. Augusto worked for the World Bank; the rape-seed fractionation was done in London by an industrial chemist nearing retirement; Michaela virtually imported from east Africa a young man who had been Lorenzo's friend, to keep him company - a grotesque experiment that seems to have worked. The film ends with a montage of testimonials from around the world to the beneficial effect of what is now known as Lorenzo's Oil.

For Lorenzo himself, the discovery was not too late, but certainly late. ALD had damaged him profoundly, and the way back must be slow and partial. The film is true to the end in its rejection of the falsely consoling, and yet audiences may not be grateful. The ratio of suffering to uplift is just too harsh, the medicine too bitter. We want magic bullets, we want false resolutions. Lorenzo's Oil is brave and ambitious in every way in its departure from the weepy formula, but formula is what we want, so long as we don't have to admit it - the easy tears that we find so oddly refreshing, the terminal agonies of strangers that put such a spring in our step.

(Photograph omitted)