Lorenzo's Oil.

Two more virtuoso performances are on display in George Miller's Lorenzo's Oil, but the brilliance of Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon contributes to a great enterprise, while Pacino's work is the enterprise.

Nolte and Sarandon play the Odones, whose little son is stricken with a disease, A.L.D., which is rare, lethal, and incurable. Frightened and outraged by how little is being done to understand this heartbreaker, the Odones become their own researchers. The title of the movie is the the outcome of their investigation: a cure for the disease that has saved many afflicted children over the last decade. Director Miller announces his theme at the beginning with a caption that quotes an African proverb that values any struggle to achieve something over the mere results. I'd be curious to know how the Odones feel about this. On the evidence of this movie, I'd guess that if they hadn't found any cure, they certainly wouldn't have felt any exaltation. They weren't striving for existentialist dignity but for success, and they found it.

But one of the thrilling things about Lorenzo's Oil is the way its superb script (by Miller and Nicholas Enright) doesn't confine itself to illustrating one theme but allows many connected themes to be developed in the course of the story. The limitations of sheer professionalism vs. the less informed but suppler efforts of the amateur; the contrasting responses of people similarly afflicted; the way catastrophe can both solidify and blast human relationships: these and many other human matters are more than merely touched upon by this splendid film.

But one theme could not have been realized but for those splendid performances by the lead players: how the fight against catastrophe can so marshal certain traits and energies in one's nature that the overall personality becomes unbalanced, or even seems to reverse itself.

Thus, Mrs. Odone, as played by Sarandon, is a supremely loving woman. Fiercely loving. She not only wants Lorenzo to survive but to survive on a high plane of dignity. When helpers, paid or voluntary, can't collaborate on this great enterprise at her demanding and self-demanding level, she dismisses them from the Odone ranks-of-the-faithful. (Some are glad to go.) But this abrasiveness is the byproduct of her love, and it is a high achievement of Sarandon's performance that she keeps the flame of this woman's love always visible to us, so that we remain on her side even when she offends or alarms people.

Nolte's achievement parallels Sarandon's. If his wife is fiercely loving, Odone is fiercely rational. It was his insistence that he and his wife explore the facts of their son's illness as if they were learning a foreign language that led to their success. Their exploit was amazing considering that neither had a medical background. (His training was economics, hers in languages and literature.) But, as he crams in libraries and networks at conferences, Odone's intensity, desperation, and lack of sleep combine to make him seem, at times, clownish, bizarre, even unhinged. Nolte never lets us forget that the center of this man is supremely reasonable even when his exterior is fraying.

George Miller could have directed his script with all the plodding literality that we see in most TV movies and Lorenzo's Oil still would have gripped because of its substance. But Miller has blazed this story onto the screen in short, economical segments, with each shot, each cut, each pan or dolly, every placement of light and shadow revealing the core of the episode. It's as if a master of haiku had learned how to employ his art to narrate a long novel. Just one sample: Lorenzo's nerve degeneration makes him incapable of holding a fork. In one silent scene, the camera travels around the supper table as each Odone matter-of-factly eats spaghetti with the fingers just as Lorenzo does. No verbal comment, no coy side glances to elicit heartwarmed titters from the audience, no poignant by-play or heartrending mime. Just a new turn in Lorenzo's illness and just another display of his family's solidarity.

Don't cheat yourself. See this movie.