Lorenzo's Oil

United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2.4 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), German ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), Danish ( Subtitles ), Dutch ( Subtitles ), English ( Subtitles ), Finnish ( Subtitles ), German ( Subtitles ), Norwegian ( Subtitles ), Swedish ( Subtitles ), WIDESCREEN (1.78:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte give brilliant performances as parents trying to save the life of their son in George Miller's harrowing and heartbreaking Lorenzo's Oil. Based on a true story, the film begins as bright young Lorenzo (Zack O'Malley Greenburg) is leading a pleasant life on the Comoro Islands. But things start to go wrong with him -- he collapses, he raves, and he loses his hearing -- so his concerned parents, Augusto (Nick Nolte) and Michaela Odone (Susan Sarandon), take him to a doctor. The diagnosis is a death warrant; they are told that Lorenzo has been diagnosed with adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), an rare and incurable nerve disease that is always fatal. When Augusto and Michaela are told to be patient as they watch their son sink further into the debilitating illness, they take matters into their own hands and start their own investigation of the disease. Using rapeseed oil, they find their own treatment for ALD. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: Golden Globes, Oscar Academy Awards, ...Lorenzo's Oil

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