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.

Beyond Disbelief: Sex, Death & the Graphic Movie

I found myself unexpectedly moved at the start of this week when the news of the death of actress Margot Kidder was announced. Was it a reminder of how old I've become, that a woman I remember as so funny and genuine in the films of hers that I've seen can have now been 69, old enough to die? It has given me a moment to reflect on a subject I've examined at greater length - movies inspired by comic books. Kidder found fame playing Lois Lane to Christopher Reeve's Superman in the four films that made up the original movie franchise in the 1970s & 80s. The extraordinary personal strength and courage that Reeve showed when a riding accident left him paralyzed from the neck down demonstrated to me how ultimately silly the superhero character was,(1) and I wished that no more Supermans would be made. 

But advances in movie technology have made it possible to represent the character's superpowers a great deal more easily and realistically. But by the time subsequent Superman movies were made, in 2006, the character itself had undergone significant changes as well. DC Comics, which owns the character, along with Batman and Wonder Woman, decided, probably because of the Reeve representation of the character, to reconceive it for a new audience of fans. 

The first time Superman appeared outside the covers of a comic book was in animated short films in the 1930s. That seemed to be an ideal medium for such a character, and it was better equipped to represent his superpowers. A Superman radio show was popular in the '40s, and producers had to find creative solutions to some of the limitations of the medium. For instance, when Superman takes flight, the actor playing Superman had to say the words, "Up, up and away'" and a sound effects department would add the sound of hurricane winds. Audiences enjoyed the moment when Superman would speak those words so much that when the radio show transitioned to early television in the '50s, the actor George Reeves would jump on a springboard and leap into the air to simulate him taking off into the air without him having to say the words "up, up and away." But the response from fans convinced Reeves to say the words, regardless of the redundancy.      

Something on the order of twenty-six years ago, I watched the second Terminator movie with some Navy friends. I was 34; they were 20 at most. When it was over I was surprised when they complimented the movie's "graphics" - which I would've called "special effects." I guessed then that it was due to their having grown up with video games, but I didn't exactly know what they meant until the appearance of the first graphic novels. At first I thought they were merely illustrated novels. Now I know that they are novels told partly in words and partly in graphics, or hand-drawn images. So, too, what are known as comic book movies are not merely reconstituted comic books. They are graphic movies consisting partly of actors and sets and costumes and partly in graphics, or CGI.

Computer Generated Imagery has given movie directors, especially those involved in the making of superhero movies, an incalculably valuable tool for the creation of movie special effects - or graphics. Their movies combine actors and live action with original computer-generated imagery on a sometimes astonishing scale. Like past technical advances in movies, like the additions of sound and color, CGI has contributed to movie realism, but through the detailed creation of original, alternate realities. They are now so seamless that they make the suspension of disbelief unnecessary. The results make the special effects used in the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder era look terribly hokey. But because movie technology is now developing at an exponential pace, today's CGI becomes obsolete almost immediately. George Lucas was so bothered by the limitations of special effects in hs first three Star Wars moves that he revisited them and made extensive improvements on them. Some fans of the original films, however, have rejected Lucas's "improvements" and prefer the original productions, replete with their seamy special effects which were state-of-the-art in 1977.

More than one observer of the differences between the first Superman movies and the latest productions have pointed out that the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder movies were made "tongue-in-cheek" - something that infuriated many comic book fans because it suggests that the subject of the movies could not be taken seriously. But the original Superman movies weren't created by fans. They were created by filmmakers who were faced with finding technical solutions to the realization of a comic book world in a wholly different medium relying on a literalness that a comic book totally eschews. 

Christopher Reeve was an actor playing a man from another planet whose molecular makeup made him defy earth's gravity and totally invulnerable to physical harm. But Christopher Reeve, however physically beautiful and incomparably brave he showed us he was, could not fly and was not, alas, invulnerable. The latest superhero movies continue to use actors, but as CGI advances, the elimination of real people from these movies is foreseeable.

Looking back on the first Superman, directed by Richard Donner in 1978, what stands out in my memory are the beautifully human scenes like the one in which the young Clark Kent attends the funeral of his adopted father (the great Glenn Ford), backed by the stirring symphonic music composed by John Williams. Or the moment when Superman, busy saving the residents of a California valley from an earthquake and flood, finds that he is too late to save Lois Lane, whose car has fallen into a fissure in the earth. By the time he wrenches her car out of the ground, tears off the driver's door, and pulls Lois out of the car, she is dead. At that moment, by making Superman shed tears, feeling deep love and grief, he proves to be greater than all of the superpowers with which the new movies are replete. As the latest Superman gets closer to making his superpowers real, the sillier the character seems. The moment one of these movies touches the truth, it falls to pieces.

The original Superman, despite my having seen it perhaps a few too many times, now looks like a towering masterpiece - because, not despite, it was made tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes a wink and a nod is all it takes to suspend our disbelief.


(1) Nothing exposes the underlying juvenile mentality behind these superheroes better than the Incredible Hulk. Obviously, whenever Bruce Banner, the normal-sized man (played by Mark Ruffalo) transforms into the Hulk, ten times his size, he should be divested of every stitch of his clothes. How is it, then, that the man's pants somehow survive the transformation? Nobody wants to expose a giant green penis - or sexuality in any firm - to the overgrown kids who flock to these movies. They would prefer to remain in a blissfully pre-sexual stage, before life got complicated by real women (not Wonder Woman) and procreation.

Margaret Ruth "Margot" Kidder, 1948-2018.