Barry Levinson's Rain Man, currently #157 on my Flickchart, occupies a very curious place in my personal viewing history. Forthwith:
1) It is almost definitely the first best picture winner I ever saw. My big movie spreadsheet says that I saw this movie in the theater -- which I think is correct -- so that means I would have been 15 when I saw it. I don't think I'd seen any of the other best picture winners when I was 15, with two possible exceptions: Chariots of Fire, though I would not have guessed I'd have actually sat down for a full viewing (I may have seen some of it on cable), and The Sound of Music, which I am pretty sure I was taken to see when I was young, but all I remember is that I found it incredibly long and I think I might not have watched the whole thing. It definitely would have been the first I made an intentional decision to see.
2) I'd say it's certainly the first best picture winner I saw before it was named best picture, though there is some small chance that I went to see it as a result of learning that it had won best picture. That's not really a thing anymore, or at least not to the same extent, but back then, a best picture win would get a movie an extended theatrical run after the ceremony, because it was sure to make a buck at the box office with so few other ways for people to see it.
3) It is definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the one of these dozen movies I'm watching as part of Audient One-Timers whose single viewing was the longest ago. Whether I saw it in 1988 or 1989, it's clearly a longer ago single viewing than the rest of these movies. There are a couple I may not have seen since college, but college started for me in 1991.
4) Even though I've seen it all the way through only one time, I feel like I know Rain Man pretty well just because I've seen snippets of it on cable, because it was thoroughly entrenched in the zeitgeist of the time, and because it has a lot of single images that feel iconic, most of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in some unusual pairing, like walking that long road outside of Wallbrook, the institution where Raymond Babbitt lived, or coming down the Vegas escalator in their matching gray suits. This movie was fully central to the culture for a while, and I know a lot of us liked to quote lines like "Definitely time for Wapner," even though that is probably a blend of two lines, and even though today, doing an imitation of a character with autism might be pretty cringey.
5) And speaking of winning Oscars, it's also the only of these 12 movies in Audient One-Timers that won the top statue, though there are some other nominees in there.
What I wanted to interrogate on this viewing was, how the heck did Rain Man make its way into the stratosphere of my Flickchart rankings, presumably continuing to win duels against films you might think I'd like better?
Let's dispense with the word "presumably." I have same data that might be useful here, that I've been keeping for no good reason, and can finally put to use. If I'd thought about it, I would have started using it when this series started, but better late than never.
I maintain my Flickchart rankings in a spreadsheet, as kind of an online backup to the website in case the website should ever go offline for any reason. And as I add new films and insert them in the correct spot in the list, I also record when a lower film beats a higher one. I've been keeping this for probably close to ten years, so I can tell you exactly when Rain Man has won or lost a duel in which one of the films switched places.
To be honest, I thought the results would be a bit more telling. It originally jumped inside the top 200 (from #204) when it beat The Untouchables and momentarily went as high as #125 in my rankings. Within only a month or two after that, it was beaten by Rabbit Hole, which went to #128 on its way up to its current lofty position of #55. (Yes I do love that movie, which was my #3 of last decade, while I have lost some of my original love for The Untouchables.)
With Rain Man dropping another 30 spots to its current ranking, that just means that 30 movies have catapulted it in the rankings, some of which are probably original entries from newly watched films. But since it does get a lot of duels, that means it has continued to hold off the films that were ranked lower, the data for which doesn't show in my spreadsheet because I only record the instances of films changing positions, not instances where the status quo is maintained.
Okay let's get back on track after that unscheduled diversion that was not as illuminating as I hoped it would be.
I think the thing about Rain Man is that it was one of the first "adult" movies I watched, around the same time that I saw movies like Broadcast News as well. I mean, it wasn't totally adult in the sense that it starred Tom Cruise, who was obviously appearing in movies that were geared toward me. At around age 26, he wasn't an "adult" in the same way that Broadcast News' William Hurt and Albert Brooks seemed like adults. But the subject matter was clearly adult, and that's the important distinction here.
I remember having a conversation with myself when I watched it, thinking that this was not a movie that I should love, and yet, by the end, I did love it. It was probably also one of the first movies I watched where a self-centered prick made himself over as a caring individual for whom material gains were less important than family, a message that I've had peddled to me a thousand times since -- though rarely as well as in Rain Man.
Watching it this time, there's a part of me that thinks yes, #157 is too high. Not having watched it again since the late 1980s, and not really having had a huge inclination to watch it again either, should tell me something about where this movie sits within my personal pantheon.
But I did really appreciate what a competent version it is of the thing it's trying to be. The word "competent" is a bit backhanded as a compliment, but I was really noticing Levinson's visual sense here. That's not to say that Levinson was/is a director without a visual sense, but I think of a movie like Diner as first and foremost a movie about dialogue. Dialogue is important in Rain Man too -- Levinson's gifts for people talking over each other, that we would have seen in Diner and that we see in Robert Altman's movies, is fully on display. But the reason there are so many iconic shots in Rain Man is because Levinson conceived them visually. I mentioned the two above, but there are also shots of the characters and their car against various backdrops of the American landscape that really stood out to me.
Other observations I appreciated as I went along:
1) Bonnie Hunt has a small role as a waitress in a diner, whose phone number Raymond memorized when he was reading the phone book the night before.
2) Hans Zimmer was the composer here, which I thought was interesting because I was just discussing Zimmer's career recently with friends in the context of having watched Terminator 2, which a couple of us thought he had scored. Another friend clarified that Zimmer didn't really get big until the 2000s, but Rain Man shows that he was clearly working long before then. This score was actually Zimmer's first Oscar nomination, and I found it interesting to ponder how little it sounded like what I would come to think of as a Hans Zimmer score. He was barely 30 and would not yet have developed a signature style, though you can hear little notes of the bombast of a future Zimmer score -- though those future scores would have considerably less pan flute.
3) Speaking of the changes since then, I appreciated the fact that Raymond has a Sony Watchman portable TV set with an antenna that's longer the TV itself, and that Charlie, with the cell phone still a glimmer in our collective eye as a society, is wedded to pay phones for the regular succession of phone calls he must make. (I think Gordon Gekko had a car phone in Wall Street, which came out a year earlier, but Charlie, despite his flashy smile and bro attitude, is about to go out of business in his company leasing exotic cars, so a car phone would have been an unaffordable luxury.)
4) I like that the lower stakes option is consistently chosen in this story. When we see the pit bosses start to talk among themselves about Raymond and Charlie's card counting, which then moves to the security video room, we're preparing for violence to be done to the brothers, or at least a harrowing escape through the streets of Las Vegas accompanied by some sort of rambunctious score. Instead, Charlie's just told he needs to take his winnings and leave, which they do. The story realizes it doesn't need additional set pieces or anything like that. It just wants a way to explain why Charlie doesn't stay in Vegas and use Raymond as a cash cow to become a millionaire, and that's all we need.
One big thing I of course considered was that they probably couldn't make Rain Man today. Even though autism is not a form of special needs in the same category as someone with Down's Syndrome, for example, there would be a debate about whether it was right to have a mainstream intellectual actor portray someone like Raymond Babbitt. What would probably happen is that the politics of it would seem like too much trouble and they just wouldn't make the movie at all.
Okay next up on the schedule in April is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That should be fun.
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