MY LEFT FOOT
A film review by Ed Arnold
Copyright 1990 Ed Arnold
(I recently posted a recommendation for the movie MY LEFT FOOT in misc.handicap, and received an inquiry from someone on the net who was perplexed about the cryptic newspaper ads for the movie and the lack of explanation about the movie's subject in my posting. For those who want to know a little more about the content of the movie before plopping down their money, here's the message I sent in reply.)
Christy Brown was born in 1932 in Dublin, Ireland. As you might guess, prenatal and delivery care was lousy for the kids of poor families at that time, and there obviously weren't any electronic monitors. In fact, prenatal care is still lousy for most poor people in Ireland, as shown by their rather high incidence of cerebral palsy. (In the case of Christy's family, his mother was pregnant 22 times, but only 13 of the children survived.)
Anyway, Christy was probably asphyxiated almost to the point of death during labor & delivery, but survived. He survived in a state in which his mind was fully functional, but he had very little use of his body; only his left foot functioned well enough to allow him any significant control over his environment, thus the title. Medically, he would probably be termed a triplegic.
With the use of his left foot, he eventually became a very good painter and wrote some books, among them MY LEFT FOOT.
(There has been another famous writer from Ireland recently, who also has CP. Christopher Nolan, who writes with a headstick, wrote a book a couple years back entitled UNDER THE EYE OF THE CLOCK, which was widely acclaimed.)
There is nothing glitzy about MY LEFT FOOT, but the emotional images are stunning. Here are some of them. DON'T READ THESE BULLETED ITEMS IF YOU ARE GOING TO GO SEE THE MOVIE AND WANT TO BE SURPRISED:
o As a child, he is called a "half-wit" by people who don't understand that he has a bright mind in a disabled body. The facial expression which the child actor was able to reproduce was remarkably accurate: a look of pain, accompanied by a downturned mouth/pouting look often seen in children with certain types of CP. o As a child, he finally makes it known to his parents that a lot is happening in his mind, by scratching out the word "MOTHER" on the floor with chalk held in his left foot. o As an adult, he is in love with the female doctor who was responsible for much of his rehabilitation, but is rejected by her. The obvious pain he feels as he tells her that he's tired of platonic love (the phrase used in the movie is "f**k Plato"), that he's tired of being denied the expression and pleasure of his sexuality simply because his twisted body doesn't work like the average person's, is a real choker.
I doubt that this would be a great movie for everyone. I suspect there are some people from the "Feeling Good" School of Life who would resent the subject material. Fact of the matter is, I'm biased for reasons I don't need to go into here; taking that into account, I'll simply say that MY LEFT FOOT is the best movie I've seen in 6 years. As I've said before, it puts the glitz of RAINMAN to shame.
Ed Arnold * era@ncar.ucar.edu * era@ncario [bitnet] * ...!ncar!era [uucp]
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