My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library.
Andrew Garfield is really excellent in the part of Robin Cavendish who in 1958, at the age of 28, contracted polio while in Kenya on business. I remember polio well, I was a boy in the 1950s and I remember taking the Salk vaccine. It is a devastating illness, it usually causes paralysis which is not reversible. Typically polio victims were given a few months to live and were kept hospitalized, on a ventilator, unable to breathe on their own.
After about a year Robin began to ask why he couldn't be moved to his home and kept on a ventilator there. Eventually he was and with the help of a friend had devices built, with battery operated ventilators, that would allow him initially to go outdoors then to even take trips. And devices which operated by slight movements of his head.
The meat of this movie is what he accomplished after he left the hospital, particularly how he helped open up development of batter ways to care for those with similar afflictions.
He eventually died in 1994, about 35 years after contracting polio. It is implied though not stated in the movie that he chose his time of death by having a doctor administer a medicine so that his ventilator could be unplugged and he could died peacefully and painlessly.
Andrew Garfield is really excellent in the part of Robin Cavendish who in 1958, at the age of 28, contracted polio while in Kenya on business. I remember polio well, I was a boy in the 1950s and I remember taking the Salk vaccine. It is a devastating illness, it usually causes paralysis which is not reversible. Typically polio victims were given a few months to live and were kept hospitalized, on a ventilator, unable to breathe on their own.
After about a year Robin began to ask why he couldn't be moved to his home and kept on a ventilator there. Eventually he was and with the help of a friend had devices built, with battery operated ventilators, that would allow him initially to go outdoors then to even take trips. And devices which operated by slight movements of his head.
The meat of this movie is what he accomplished after he left the hospital, particularly how he helped open up development of batter ways to care for those with similar afflictions.
He eventually died in 1994, about 35 years after contracting polio. It is implied though not stated in the movie that he chose his time of death by having a doctor administer a medicine so that his ventilator could be unplugged and he could died peacefully and painlessly.