My Left Foot

Back when assisted suicide was occupying a lot of attention, a play was produced on Broadway in 1978, and then adapted to film in '81, called "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" It was about as extreme an argument for the "right to die" for an otherwise helpless person, paralyzed from the neck down, on life-support perhaps indefintely, who has decided that he wants to die. The film, starring Richard Dreyfus, wasn't easy to sit through, and not just because of the prevailing fatalistic tone (we know how the story ends). But I wonder if Christopher Reeve had seen it, too, and what he might have said about it after a riding accident in 1995 left him similarly paralyzed. I commented elsewhere about the heroism of Reeve, how he made a mockery of the asininities behind comic book superheroes. He showed more strength and courage in his last days than Superman, Spiderman, and the X-Men put together.

But Reeve was paralyzed by a riding accident. What about the people who were born with incapacitating disabilities, like cerebral palsy victims? Jack Kevorkian, the notorious "Doctor Death" who was prosecuted repeatedly for his participation in assisted suicides, once admitted that he knew people born without arms or legs who had more of a will to live than most fully-equipped, perfectly ambulatory people do. This will, or determination, to not be prevented from living a full life by a lack of mobility, to overcome physical shortcomings and disabilities of all kinds, is a blow struck against misfortune (and what used to be called fate) as well as a source for great storytelling. Telling his own life story, in his own words, with his own toes on his left foot, the only one of his extremities that he could control, was Christy Brown's great achievement (he was also a novelist and a gifted painter - with his foot!), and the Jim Sheridan film My Left Foot (1989) is a moving, funny, defiant kick in the balls of disability.

The first thing we see is his electric typewriter. Then a bare (left) foot appears and dexterously removes a standing record from its sleeve, places it on a player's spindle, turns it on and puts the needle down. Pausing the turntable, then letting it go ("Un'aura amorosa" from Mozart's Cosi fan tutte), we follow the camera up to his face, as he looks defiantly at us for a moment ... and the story begins. On his way to receive an honorary award, a convoy of white Rolls Royces glides up to a house in Crumlin, a suburb of Dublin, to carry Christy and his whole family to Trinity College.

Christy Brown was a marvel. No one has been quite able to explain why English literature is populated by so many Irish geniuses. Swift, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Brendan Behan, Benedict Kiely, Colm Toibín. Christy Brown occupies a place in their company, but how he got there sets him quite apart. He was a victim of cerebral palsy as an infant that left him unable to walk or control his limbs. His poor family couldn't afford "special needs" treatment or formal education. He was kept at home, loved by his family, but until the age of five when it was discovered he had a perfectly normal intelligence, he was thought to be as mentally disabled as he was physically.

Ireland is a thoroughly Roman Catholic country. The church became ingrained in their national character because it was one of the things that distinguished the Irish since the 16th century from their English occupiers. One of the unfortunate consequences of this was the enormity of Irish families, because the Church prohibited the use of contraceptives (it still does). Christy was one of thirteen children.* But it was the unified strength of the support of his family, especially after the death of their father, that is one of the salient ingredients of this beautiful film.

The Irish cast of heretofore unknowns - outside of Ireland - is, except for Fiona Shaw as Christy's carer, perfect. Especially wonderful is Brenda Fricker as Christy's mother - a woman for whom the word "indomitable" was coined. She is the one who makes the scene of the discovery that Christy can write (the word "Mother", but as Christy tells it, he wrote only the letter "A") so very touching, when, in any other actor's hands, it could've been so treacly. She cries, but they are the tears of overwhelming pride in a child she always believed in. Ray McAnally, as Christy's father, is the perfect combination of a poor man's bull-headedness, but also his pride in the only things he managed to produce in abundance, his children.

But it's Daniel Day Lewis who deserves the highest praise in a role that so many actors seek but so few are capable of playing. With Sheridan's help (they would work together again in two more films, In the Name of the Father [1993] and The Boxer [1998]), Day Lewis clears away every bit of potential sentimentality into which playing such a role threatened to sink him. I am always wary of films that portray the lives of people who are physically impaired. Too often, the actors use it as an excuse to show off their laziness by leaning too heavily on our natural sympathy for them. Think of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. However much that script (by Bo Goldman) tried to make him into a prize asshole, he winds up tugging at your heart strings, whatever the hell they are. Sheridan is helped abundantly by Christy's story, which he sticks to faithfully, structuring scenes around their unfolding when a nurse assigned to escort him at the award ceremony reads My Left Foot. By never once asking for our pity, Christy gains our greatest sympathy.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day.


* In his own words, Brown gives us his family's tally: "I was born in the Rotunda Hospital, on June 5th, 1932. There were nine children before me and twelve after me, so I myself belong to the middle group. Out of this total of twenty-two,
seventeen lived, but four died in infancy, leaving thirteen still to hold the family fort.