What got me into this movie was actually the theme "I'll Never Leave You" written by Kenny G and James Newton Howard. The beautiful yet melancholy melody delineates a heart-breaking story about a wealthy young lukemia patient, Victor's (Campbell Scott) final stage of life with a surrogate nurse Hillary (Julia Roberts).Recognized of his soon demise, Victor makes the most out of limited lifetime through teaching art and making himself happy. Woven with nurse Hillary, Victor realizes being strong and living life to the full is what really matters. The movie is filled with touching life struggle battling the disease, and also bittersweet conversations among the tormented couple.
Scenes and music are both incredible and well-matched. It will touch your soul and prompt you re-evaluate your own life.
I would highly recommend this film. The characters are great, the casting is wonderful, especially the incomparable Colleen Dewhurst (Campbell Scott's real mother), and the film leaves you with a true feeling of hope and that all things are possible. Watch this film, you won't be disappointed!!!!!!!"Dying Young," based on the novel of the same name by Marti Leimbach, follows the adventures of Oakland native Hilary O'Neil (a luminous Julia Roberts), a beautiful and frustrated young woman who lives at home with her annoying mother (a woefully underutilized Ellen Burstyn). Hilary's struck out on both a satisfying career and her love life. Determined to move out from under her mother's grasp, she answers a newspaper ad for someone with medical experience. She trudges up Nob Hill in a super-short miniskirt and red heels to discover her would-be employer Victor is a wealthy, intelligent recluse (Campbell Scott, son of George C. and Colleen Dewhurst) with recurring leukemia. Victor has been through bouts of chemo in-between remissions for the last ten years, and he's looking for a nurse to care for him during the latest round of treatment.
I had a former teacher and friend die from adult-onset leukemia ten years ago, and I felt that the film does a decent job at scratching the surface of the physical and mental suffering that chemo induces. Chemo basically loads a person with a cocktail of poisons in the hope of killing off the cancer before it kills off the patient. Side effects include brutal nausea and vomiting (although there are newer and more effective antiemetics in the two decades since this was filmed), mouth sores, numerous digestive problems (the chemo solutions frequently damage the GI tract), a flu-like syndrome (fever and chills), joint and muscle pain, weight loss, insomnia, and impotence. Those who are squeamish may find it difficult to watch several scenes of chemo-induced vomiting and other graphic side effects.
Hilary had no idea what to expect when Victor said that he'd need help; beyond the immediate cleaning up from bouts of vomiting, he goes through excruciating periods of physical and mental suffering, which almost prove too much for her. Initially, their relationship is strictly business; she cleans up after him and cares for him, he pays her 400 a week plus a room of her own in the mansion. But Hilary begins to sense Victor's life before leukemia struck at 18; we see a series of photos of a young, confident Victor participating in sports and smiling from a happier time. Victor's decade-long bout with chemo has left him bitter and reclusive and he's loath to leave the mansion, but Hilary coaxes him out of his shell. The two go to a fancy restaurant and are served carpaccio (raw cow). In a tender role reversal, when Hilary discovers what it's made of, she frets "What if I throw up?" to which Victor tenderly replies, "I'll take care of you."
Robert's character seems to care for Victor out of compassion more than love. Victor is prickly, detached, petulant and superior (he's been working on his PhD dissertation on art history), and outwardly gives little reason to love him. His desire for Hilary is fueled by his acute loneliness and fears about dying (the survival rates for various adult-onset leukemias are still only 14 to 50% for five-year survival). Desperate to escape the vicious cycle of chemo, Victor decides to rent a cottage in Mendocino and convinces Hilary to accompany him. I felt a sense of déjà vu as Roberts is given an impromptu lesson in art history as repayment for her kindness (in her more recent film Mona Lisa Smile, Roberts plays a wordly art history professor at a restrictive girls' college in a role reversal from Dying Young). The scenery and cinematography are particularly gorgeous in these segments; rich panoramas of sea and sky fill the screen, and the film's poignant love theme by Kenny G. (Dying Young: Original Soundtrack Album) floats ethereally through tender montages of happier times.
Victor and Hilary initially play at housekeeping and married life; his hair grows back, and he's able to go for walks and do more physical activities. But the vacation in paradise is short-lived; it turns out that Victor's been hiding a dark secret of his own, one which terrifies and infuriates Hilary. The film falters in the middle: a potential rival, good-natured blue collar handyman Gordon (Vincent D'Onofrio) relates more easily with the street-smart Hilary than the intellectual Victor is able to. Gordon and Hilary bond over sitcom trivia and other blue-collar pursuits, while Victor loves to belittle Gordon with displays of his worldliness and superior book learning. In the book and original cut of the movie, Hilary has a full-fledged affair with Gordon under Vincent's nose, but due to poor test audience reactions, it was dropped, so the lightweight inclusion of Gordon felt forced and unnecessary. Also, the film's original ending (more in line with the darker mood of the book) was changed after poor test reactions. A side plot involving eccentric winery owner Estelle (Campbell Scott's real-life mother Colleen Dewhurst, in one of her last film roles before her death) and her eccentric garden maze seemed out of place (other than showing the return of Victor's illness as he struggles to complete the maze).
The tearjerker climax features both Hilary and Victor struggling to voice their deepest fears, and this was my biggest problem with the movie. I realize that chemo treatment has improved over the last twenty years, but if I had already struggled through a decade of chemo, I would want my family to respect my right to refuse treatment. That's never presented as an option. Despite strong performances by Scott and Roberts (who seems to be reprising her role in Pretty Woman (15th Anniversary Special Edition) without breaking a sweat), I never felt an attachment to Victor and Hilary as a couple; he seemed too controlling and self-centered, and instead of offering compassion towards Hilary's upbringing on "the other side of the tracks," he tries to mold her in his image. This is more of an issue with the screenplay than the actors' performances: indeed, Campbell Scott in particular is completely invisible as an actor; instead, we see the raw desperation and fear of a frightened human being living with a death sentence.
Overall, it's a solid film that's worth seeing at least once, if only for one of Campbell Scott's finest performances (I first saw him in the Hallmark movies Follow The Stars Home and The Love Letter). As for Julia Roberts, she's beautiful, but I felt a sense of emotional detachment from Hilary. The DVD offers very few extras except for a few minutes of B-roll footage and two original trailers for Dying Young; the original ending isn't present. And a final thought: just like the U.S. retitling of "Inside I'm Dancing" as Rory O'Shea Was Here, naming a movie about a cancer victim as "Dying Young" kind of lets the cat out of the bag; I preferred the European title A Choice of Love.
Read Best Reviews of Dying Young (1991) Here
Dyeing Young is one of my top 3 favorite movies of all time. I have seen it numerous times and still get impressed with both Julia Roberts and Campbell Scott's performance in the movie. I loved everything about it.Want Dying Young (1991) Discount?
Initially I was a little disappointed that the story didn't go deep enough, but as time goes on, I find myself feeling very fond of the movie.Hillary O'Neil (Julia Roberts) needs a job and a place to live, and so interviews for a live-in position taking care of a sick person in the ultra-wealthy neighborhood of Nob Hill in San Francisco. The job calls for some nursing skills, which she doesn't have. She flunks the interview. However, the young man who is sick, Victor Geddes (Campbell Scott), is secretly watching the interview. He overrides the interviewer and hires her. The job pays $400.00 a week, plus room and meals, which for Hillary is the good life.
Victor, Geddes Hillary learns, is a Phd. student in art history who has completed everything but his thesis. His thesis is about two, or several, German impressionists. He shows Hillary slides of their paintings. The artists were obsessed with the women they were painting. One of the artists, Clint, has a number of paintings of a thin woman with big, flaming red hair.
The connection between Hillary and the red head in Clint's paintings wasn't pulled off very well. We still feel like Victor hired Hillary mostly for her looks, independent of anything else. It still comes off more as a coincidence than one of the reasons he hired her.
Hillary comes from a background where she worked in Diners, parties in clubs and discos and sleeps with construction workers. Victor comes from a background that included butlers, personal assistants, never learning to drive because his family employed a full-time driver. The two have a lot to learn from each other.
She doesn't know what she got herself in for. Victor has Leukemia. One of Hillary's jobs is to accompany him to chemotherapy treatments at the hospital and take care of him afterwards. Hillary has quite a strong reaction to just seeing the rest of the patients, large in number, at the chemotherapy ward in the hospital. It's a normal, human reaction. I don't blame her. I would react the same.
Hillary is the type of person, who, when the going got too tough, always packed her bags and left. She was without a place to live because she had walked in on her live-in guy, in bed with another woman. So Hillary packed her bags and left. After returning home from the hospital, Hillary has a temper tantrum, because she can't deal with it, and packs her bags. Luckily she didn't leave.
We see scene after scene after scene of Victor suffering the after-effects of chemotherapy. The impact of chemo, as show in the movie, can't be underestimated. No wonder when people speak of chemo they tend to do it in the same hushed tones as the big "C" itself.
In any movie with a young good-looking female and male lead, we viewers expect, or hope, they fall in love. This aspect, I feel was handled well, somewhat realistically. Hillary is ambiguous throughout. They become close; they become friends, but any normal woman would hold back from falling in love with someone in Victor's shape. Nothing in the movie was suggestive of gold digging, except for a remark by Hillary's mother, and that's to be expected.
Victor intentions are much less ambiguous than Hillary's. He just doesn't spell out what they are, early on. In the latter part of the movie, Victor lies to Hillary and tells her he no longer needs chemo and takes Hillary to a vacation house in the country. The truth is, Victor has renounced any more chemotherapy, and what he wants to do in the country is to try and live normally for a time before he dies. You can't blame him.
Victor's life has been cold and isolated. He tells Hillary early on that his father, a lawyer, is in Japan on business while suffers through chemotherapy. When Victor first hires Hillary, she subtly and insinuatingly manages to probe if Victor has hired her with the intention of sleeping with her. Victor bluntly replies that there have been other women in the house before. What Victor is looking for is love and intimacy.
My hope for Hillary's character is that the experience will help her to put her own problems in better perspective. Can't deal with seeing the chemo ward? Try having leukemia yourself. Hillary can always pack her bags and leave. Victor cannot. My hope for the viewer is that s/he comes away with a respect for the life of the dying.
Julia Roberts' and Campbell Scott's roles were balanced, but the film focuses more on the drama surrounding Hillary rather than Campbell Scott. Although looking at the problems associated with being the caretaker for someone dying of cancer is a legitimate one, the person with the cancer has the bigger problem. Campbell Scott should have been the lead role. His was the far more dramatic viewpoint.
Hillary O'Neil was a more sober role for Julia Roberts than her usual movies, although the personal side of Hillary was similar to the Pretty Woman and Erin Brockavich roles. This is what viewers have come to expect of her. I find that one of Julia Robert's most interesting strengths as an actress and a woman is that she is capable of turning on hundreds of different facial expressions showing all sorts of nuanced feelings, attitudes, shades of emotions, colors and facets. This story was a perfect vehicle to exploit that talent, but we see little of it.
What is disappointing is that given the material and the cast, the producers, director and screen writers should been able to create a much more powerful movie.
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