The Screengrab : noel murray

Yesterday's Hits: Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Here’s the pitch: a young man, reeling from the death of his father, drives across country with the brother he never knew who, as it happens, is autistic. Cast one of Hollywood’s most respected actors as the autistic brother and its hottest leading man as the younger brother, and even today the pitch sounds like something straight out of high-concept hell. Yet despite its premise, which jazzed up the bankable but disreputable formula of the road movie with a mental-illness twist, Rain Man was not only the most popular movie of 1988 but also one of the most acclaimed Hollywood releases of the year, winning both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the only film ever to win both of these prestigious awards.

Today, Rain Man is largely remembered for its awards, for Hoffman’s performance, and the memorable lines he contributed to popular culture, including such favorites as “I’m an excellent driver.” But like many surprise hits, Rain Man was initially seen as a somewhat risky project by Hollywood. Several directors and a number of studios passed on the film before Barry Levinson and United Artists ended up making it. And while the film was in production, both of its stars had doubts about its potential. The film’s opening weekend receipts were disappointing, but soon it began to generate ecstatic word of mouth among moviegoers, eventually raking in over $170 million domestically to become the highest-grossing movie of the year.

So what was the secret to Rain Man’s success? Well, the stars didn’t hurt. By and large, major Hollywood projects were more star-driven in the eighties than they are nowadays, and Rain Man followed the popular Hollywood formula of pairing a respected veteran actor with a hot young star. And in 1988, there was no young star hotter than Tom Cruise. Still riding high from the success of Top Gun, Cruise had earlier in the year turned the cheesy bartending drama Cocktail into a sizable hit. Yet even in his younger days, he had a tendency to seek out established talent. He had followed Top Gun with The Color of Money, which paired him off with Paul Newman under the direction of Martin Scorsese, and Rain Man gave him a similar opportunity to work with Hoffman.

But while Hoffman was the one who got most of the accolades, I think that the film hinges just as much on Cruise’s performance. Don’t get me wrong- Hoffman’s certainly impressive. But due to the nature of Raymond Babbitt’s autism, Hoffman doesn’t have much of a character arc to play- he doesn’t change so much as cycle, again and again, through his daily routine. Levinson and screenwriters Ron Bass and Barry Morrow wisely avoided the temptation to soft-pedal Raymond’s autism by miraculously having him “recover”, and they’re to be commended for this. However, a movie solely about Raymond would have quickly become repetitive (think Jeanne Dielman, which actually sounds awesome so never mind), and certainly would not have been made by a Hollywood studio.

Because of this, it falls to Charlie (Cruise) to drive the story, and Cruise was more than up to the task. Charlie is a complicated character who’s often selfish and unsympathetic. Consider how greedy he can be, especially when it comes to Raymond- he steals Raymond from an institution in an attempt to procure more money from his late father’s estate, and once he discovers Raymond’s prodigious memory and gift for quickly counting large numbers of objects, Charlie decides to take Raymond to Las Vegas to score money by cheating a casino. But Cruise’s refusal to make Charlie a saint makes him all the more relatable. Sure, he can be a self-centered prick, but we also feel his pain whenever we see him dealing with Raymond. After all, keeping one’s life together (especially when the bank is breathing down your neck) is difficult enough without having to plan one’s days around someone like Raymond, for whom the need to eat one’s meals on time, watch The People’s Court, or wear the correct pair of underwear supersedes all else.

Because we see Charlie struggling with Raymond, it becomes all the more heartwarming when he finally learns to love and appreciate his older brother. In many ways, Rain Man may contain Cruise’s most undervalued performance, since not only is he upstaged by Hoffman’s showier work, but he also plays the sort of role that was often associated with him, the yuppie hotshot with an overabundance of alpha-male charm. However, to call Charlie Babbitt a stereotypical “Tom Cruise role” seems reductive, since it overlooks the nuances of the character. Then as now, Cruise was a fine actor, and one who was often doomed to being underappreciated.

Rain Man isn’t a perfect movie. Occasionally, it gets a little too plot-driven, as when Charlie and Raymond make their stop in Vegas. But at its best, it’s as good now as it ever was, due to the performances of Hoffman and Cruise and the rhythm and chemistry between them. Cruise might have joked that it was “two schmucks in a car,” but I think that’s what works about the movie- it gives these two fine actors sufficient time and space to work together without pinning them down to too much plot. And while Raymond doesn’t get better in the end, at least now he has a brother to visit him in the institution.

For better or worse, in the two decades since its release Rain Man has become the dominant pop culture image most people associate with autism. A few years ago, the Onion A.V. Club critic Noel Murray- himself the father of an autistic child- posted his thoughts on the film, filtered through his own experience. In this post (which you can read in full here), he states that although the film gets many of the details of autism right, it suffers because Raymond feels less like a character than a plot device through which Charlie can find redemption, and that the subject of autism would be better served by a movie that followed him and found drama in his routines. It’s a perfectly reasonable opinion of the film considering his circumstances, and I don’t disagree with him. As a movie about autism, Rain Man doesn’t quite cut it. But taken on its own terms, I’d say it still works pretty darn well.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 4

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Just a few minutes into Ballast, Lance Hammer's methodically withholding feature debut, I already felt confident of two things. One, I wasn't going to like this movie. Two, everybody else would, for reasons having little to do with Hammer's artistry and a great deal to do with his sensibility. Sure enough, shortly after I bailed at the end of reel two, weary of the film's mannered silences and artless shakycam, I found Robert Koehler's Variety rave, which predictably declared Hammer "a humanist artist" and praised his film for "engag[ing] audiences' best human responses." (As opposed to, say, their arachnoid responses.)

Alas, since I don't subscribe to the self-congratulatory notion that a film's worth hinges on the degree to which it reflects your own worldview, thereby making you feel good about yourself for admiring it — a phenomenon I've dubbed "soup kitchen cinema" — I can't join in the hosannahs. My friend Noel Murray of the Onion AV Club, who stayed to the end (and was somewhat underwhelmed), assures me that Ballast does eventually shake off its sub-Dardennes torpor and achieve some genuine power. But let me briefly recount the moments that made me decide I'd seen more than enough. (This will involve some mild spoilers concerning events that happen in the first few minutes, which you're likely to encounter anyway if you're so much as skimming other reviews/synopses.)

After a brief, lyrical pre-title sequence, we discover Lawrence (inexpressive nonprofessional Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), a heavyset black man, sitting on the couch in the darkened living room of a dilapidated house, just staring into space. A neighbor appears, first knocking and then, when Lawrence fails to respond, opening the unlocked front door and stepping inside. The neighbor, a middle-aged white guy, is looking for someone who turns out to be Lawrence's twin brother, and finds him lying dead in the bedroom, an apparent suicide. Naturally, the neighbor has questions for Lawrence, but Lawrence says nothing. He just keeps staring into space. Eventually, as the neighbor calls 911, Lawrence silently stands and walks out the front door, without so much as a glance at the neighbor; through the open door, we can see him disappear around a corner.

At which point I had to restrain myself from saying aloud "Aaaand gunshot in five. . . four. . . three. . ." I wasn't 100% certain whether Lawrence was about to return with a gun and blow the neighbor away or just shoot himself offscreen. But Hammer's setup for an "unexpected" act of violence couldn't possibly have been more clumsily blatant. If you don't know that a nonresponsive, near-catatonic character who abruptly leaves the room is about to do something horrific, you can't have seen very many movies in your life.

One offscreen gunshot later, Lawrence is in the hospital, having survived his suicide attempt. We get a series of brief, uninflected shots showing his surgery, his recovery, his discharge. (This is all in the film's first five to ten minutes.) People speak to Lawrence, but he never says anything in return. Weeks have now passed — we hear from a doctor that Lawrence was unconscious for ten days — and the same neighbor shows up, wanting to know whether Lawrence is okay; he's also come to return Lawrence's dog, which he's been looking after since the "accident." Lawrence opens the door when the neighbor knocks and then just stands there, silent, for the entire scene. Are you okay, Lawrence? Silence. I brought your dog back, figured you'd want him now. Silence. I guess I'll just keep him a while longer, then. Silence. You sure you're okay? Silence. All right then.

I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. We're not talking here about the melancholy expressionism of a Tsai Ming-liang or the perverse whimsy of a Kim Ki-duk. This is by no means a deliberately stylized world in which a mute character violates no rule of verisimilitude. Hammer is aiming for raw naturalism, and we're apparently expected to believe not only that Lawrence's behavior is a credible expression of grief (which I might buy in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death, but not weeks later following a lengthy hospital stay), but that the neighbor, who in all respects appears to be an ordinary guy, would simply accept these unmistakable signs of mental imbalance, never once pressing or protesting.

Ask yourself how you would react if someone you knew just stood there like a statue, making no response of any kind to anything you said. This nonsense bears no relationship whatsoever to genuine human behavior — it's just a novice filmmaker's misguided notion of what might constitute badass minimalism. That so many people seem prepared to take it seriously only shows how far good intentions will take you.

Movie of the Year(s)

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:30:00 GMT

Movie geeks like your humble authors here at the Screengrab are no different than geeks of any other sort. That is to say, we are compulsive listmakers, inveterate rankers and categorizers, and the sort of people who will happily mouth off our opinions about things that happened years before we were born. And we're proud to say that over at the Onion A.V. Club, the reviewing staff (friends of this program, as they say in the biz) have found a delightful way of upholding the tradition by combining all three of those geeky tendencies: in their enjoyable new "My Favorite Movie Year" feature, each of their film reviewers picks one year in the past they think of as an exceptional one for film and ranks the top five movies that debuted in that year. The exercise kicked off a week ago when Noel Murray discussed the best films of 1974, and this week, the redoubtable Keith Phipps takes a look at 1967, singling out Bonnie and Clyde, Play Time, Point Blank, The Graduate and Two for the Road as reasons that year was particularly praiseworthy. (Sure, Keith. How quickly we forget Hillbillies in a Haunted House.) Next week should also be worth looking in on as the always-amusing Nathan Rabin picks the best of 1994.