MY LEFT FOOT
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Upbeat but not saccharine tale of Christy Brown. Paralyzed with cerebral palsy so that he has control only over one foot, he becomes an artist and an author. The film perhaps over-emphasizes his romantic life over other aspects that could be more interesting, but it is a superb performance. Rating: +2.
Christy Brown was born with cerebral palsy to a poor Dublin family. Paralyzed so that he has control only over one foot, he used that foot to write and paint, distinguishing himself in both until his death in 1981. This is his story from birth to his late thirties, told as a series of flashbacks as he thinks about his life one afternoon. This is not just his biography, but also a portrait of living conditions for the poor in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s. We see not just his life but also his times. His father was a heavy drinker and a bully. Some of the early scenes of Brown as a child trapped in this household and in a body he cannot operate have a nightmarish quality most fictional horror films cannot approach. We cower with a terrified Christy when his father goes on drunken rampages. People call him an idiot to his face and he has no way to respond or prove them wrong. We struggle with Christy the first time he tries to communicate, scratching on the floor with a piece of chalk between his toes, answering an arithmetic problem that his father had missed a few minutes before. Like many people with communications disabilities, he is assumed to be profoundly retarded when in fact he has a very quick mind.
This sort of film could easily have become sentimental inspirational muck. In fact, it has more of the feel of Daniel Keyes's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON. As Christy raises himself, his world perspective changes. At times he is not very likable and often he is manipulative. Where the story falls short of FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON is that it lacks the drama of the fall or that book's awe at intellectual achievement. And like the aborted stage version of FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, the peak of Christy Brown's achievement is that he "gets the girl," nothing more profound. In spite of the film's apparent emphasis on the importance of Christy's love life, it is one of the better portraits of the life of the handicapped on film.
Daniel Day Lewis is good as the adult Christy, as has been noted by other reviewers. I have seen little credit given, however, to what I consider even better performances by Ray McAnally as Christy's swaggering, ruffian father and especially by Hugh O'Conor as the young Christy. At age 13, O'Conor turns in the best performance in a well-acted film. The screenplay was written by Shane Cunningham and the director, Jim Sheridan. My rating is a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzx!leeper
leeper@mtgzx.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews