Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien

I can't express how phenomenal a film this is. Partly it is Jessica Yu's superb, understated direction. But a large part is Mark O'Brien himself, whose abiding intelligence and evocative poetry are electrifyingly cinematic, despite his being confined to an iron lung. I saw this film almost a year before it won the Oscar, and I have rarely been as happy as I was then. When I heard he died several years later, I was genuinely saddened. I watched it again today, when it was announced that Christopher Reeve had died. It reminds you how truly special some people are -- sometimes not because of what they do, but simply who they are. Which, when you think about it, may be the same thing. Don't miss it.

I had never heard of Mark O'Brien when Jessica Yu's "Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien" won Best Documentary Short Subject at the Academy Awards. But the documentary shows not only what O'Brien went through, but how he wanted to be known to the world. Basically, he wanted to be known not as a cripple, but as a human. Despite spending most of his life in an iron lung, the polio-afflicted O'Brien managed to be a journalist and poet until his death in 1999.

Progress with polio has gotten made since the documentary's release. In 2014, only Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan saw cases of the disease, and in 2015 Nigeria had stopped the spread. It sounds like a terrible disease. In the end, Mark O'Brien deserves a lot of credit for what he accomplished, and Jessica Yu deserves credit for bringing his story to the world. I understand that her most recent movie was about water crises.

I recommend the documentary.

What you see in this article is really who he was. A deep thinker, he's the reason I started writing at a young age. He never gave up. He passed three years after his film won an academy award. I'm not a big fan of the sessions but the actor nailed his body and movements.

This is an absolute exceptional film taking you into the mind, life, struggle, joy, depression, love, and eventual (beyond the film) death of a completely developed person but physically fully incapacitated.

Think of where most of us may find ourselves in the coming 30 to 50 years and you may see yourself in Brian's place though he was strickened so much earlier in life.

Thank Jessica for doing a superb performance in documenting this person's life. Will never forget her remarks at the Academy Awards where she so humbly remarked (and I paraphrase) that it was indeed a gala where the dress you were wearing to it cost more than what it cost to make the film.

And thank you Brian!

This is probably the second most difficult comment I have written on anything at the IMDb, but I saw this yesterday and, if I didn't comment on this, I likely would regret not doing so, so here goes:

Mark O'Brien was born roughly ten years before I was and contracted polio at age six, in 1955. Thus he was in an iron lung before I was even born. I have Cerebral Palsy, but even in that, I am comparatively fortunate. Mr. O'Brien struggled just to stay alive, to draw breath. Placed in context to that, my difficulties are a minor inconvenience. But, be that as it may, the reason that this struck me so profoundly is that, despite the major differences in our particular circumstances, at times in this documentary, his remarks were all too familiar to me. The disabled are viewed quite differently by a large segment of the "presently able-bodied" (that's as logical and meaningful a label as "differently abled", a phrase that is such a null that I hardly know where to begin in discussing it, so I won't) and most disabled individuals put up with things on a daily basis that would send the average person to the top of a building with a rifle and a scope inside of a week. On bad days, I think most people would probably breathe a sigh of relief if we, reminders of humanity's fragility, would just vanish. O'Brien not only thought that, he said and wrote it out loud.

One segment, toward the end, made me start crying, it hit so close to home. I won't discuss it here, but O'Brien talked about something in front of a camera that I doubt I could have even tap danced around. To anyone who has seen this, what O'Brien talked about here, it's not just an isolated instance, not just one voice in the wilderness. I'd wager that there are a lot of people out and about who'd say the same if pressed.

Disabled people are just that-PEOPLE who happen to be disabled. Treat us as such-people, more or less like you, just a bit different.

This should be in print and available. Well worth tracking down. Most highly recommended.