Recovery

This movie is the most powerful, emotional, and inspiring movie I have ever seen. The description of brain damage like a road network is brilliant. This is a heartfelt, and definitely heartBREAKING, tale of the struggle of man who no longer understands his own brain. Everything is difficult, people are mad at him for something he doesn't remember doing, even though it just happened yesterday. Themes are: confusion, frustration, anger, fear, hopelessness and love. David Tennant expresses the stress and rejection Alan experiences, beautifully. He is angry, sobbing, sullen to the point of laying in bed wishing to turn off his whole brain. The ending is complex, and designed to be judged differently, depending on your viewpoint. Personally, I find it sweet.

I'm so glad I taped this film when it came on BBC last month! It blew my mind, so gut wrenching and real. David Tennant is absolutely fabulous in this, even though his character isn't always that easy to like or identify with. The final scene where he plays the song just broke my heart, those eyes....

I'm guessing that he made this film in between the Dr. Who series, and that makes it even more of an achievement for me. I just love Dr. Who and yet I saw absolutely nothing of him in Mr. Tennants portrayal of this man who knows that he has changed and struggles to create some sort of new identity and life.

great little intense drama!

Alan (David Tennant) and Tricia Hamilton (Sarah Parish) are married with two sons. He's a manager of a property company. He gets hit by a truck and suffers brain damage. He wakes up from a coma with memory loss and unstable behaviors. The family struggles to cope and Tricia has little help. He can't keep his job and they are broke.

David Tennant does a good performance of a brain-damaged man. Sarah Parish has a nice turn when she breaks down. The story doesn't really have much drama. It's one incident after another. It doesn't build as much as it's a drip, drip, drip of Alan's outbursts. It doesn't make for a great dramatic movie but it's compelling for people dealing with similar situations.

Recovery is a well-judged and balanced drama of a sensitive subject that doesn't sentimentalise the main characters. David Tennant and Sarah Parish bring to the fore the complex and conflicting emotions of a couple deeply in love struggling to come to terms with the personality changes they both endure and also must make to survive a tragic accident.

Tennant, as Alan, brings humour as well as a dangerous lecherousness, as an engineer recovering from a memory loss brought on by a road accident. Alan is not portrayed simply as a victim but as human being with feelings doing the best he can to make sense of his new life. Sarah Parish's Tricia is not a clichéd stand-by-her-man housewife who will do anything to support her husband. She struggles with falling out of love with Alan, as the man she once new and loved is now a completely different person - a stranger to her.

Contrary to some opinion, this - in my view - makes perfect Sunday night viewing. Too often, we are shown soft family dramas or detective series, like Heartbeat, which rot and putrefy the brain. Programme commissioners seem to think that the traditional day of rest is also a day when our minds go to sleep. More challenging and thought-provoking drama like Recovery would seriously change the situation.

When I saw this on TV I was nervous...whats if they messed it up? Millions of families like mine that live with a brain damaged man, in my case my Dad, would be let down. I watched it with my Mum and we both ended up crying, it was so accurate and captured how the family feels as well as the person having suffered the brain injury. The actors were all wonderful and I had no complaints, my Mums told me she hasn't been able to stop thinking about it. I hope this program made many people aware of what it's like living with brain damage and what it's like for the families. More programs like this should be made, I was surprised at how good it was and it's really shook me up emotionally.