We'll soon have a new Audient Bridesmaids entry, unless you believe I'm Still Here is about to pull off one of the larger upsets in Oscar history and win the top prize. Which would still make it a movie I have to see, just not a best picture bridesmaid. It wouldn't have become an entry in this series at all except that I didn't go to a Tuesday night screening of it for its Australian release, as this week's schedule just didn't work out for it.
But because I am obligated to watch the available candidates in reverse chronological order, per my own dictum, I decided to sneak in one more non-I'm Still Here movie, before I'm Still Here officially becomes the required next viewing in this series tomorrow night.
The next up in the series was Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot from 1989, as it has been for a little over a year since the last Audient Bridesmaids movie I watched, 1991's The Prince of Tides. That viewing went well enough, as I named Tides among the ten best non-2024 movies I watched in 2024, that you'd think I'd have gotten on to My Left Foot sooner. There's clearly something about Oscar season that brings out the impulse to revisit this periodic series, but I will try to give it love more regularly going forward. If I don't, I'll never make any progress toward watching the more than 100 titles I have to eventually see if I want to accomplish the goal of watching all of them.
I obviously knew this was Daniel Day-Lewis' breakout role, but I forgot it was also where most of us were introduced to Jim Sheridan. Even if I didn't see this movie at the time, I quickly came to consider Sheridan a vital artist in this landscape, as he would follow this with films like In the Name of the Father, The Boxer and In America. (In imagining what films I might see on his IMDB when I checked just now, I think I was confusing his output with that of fellow countryman Neil Jordan, who is only a year younger.) In fact My Left Foot was Sheridan's very first film. Day-Lewis was much deeper into his career -- 18 years, in fact, if you count his uncredited teenage role in 1971's Sunday Bloody Sunday. It isn't necessary to recite what he would go on to accomplish after this first of an eventual three Oscars.
One of the first things that struck me about the film is that it's not a film that could get made today, or not in the same way, anyway. We tend to shy away from films about people with severe physical handicaps like the cerebral palsy that afflicted Christy Brown, in part because we now feel like we have to get an actor who actually has that condition to play the role, and it's hard to find someone with cerebral palsy who is also an excellent actor (and a known enough commodity to lead the movie). The thing that earned Day-Lewis so much praise in 1989 might now earn him an equivalent amount of scorn -- though a physical handicap (I'm not even sure I should be using that word, but let's go with it) is a bit different than a mental handicap.
There was no doubt of the sharpness of Brown's brain, as he ended up writing his own memoirs in excellent prose (all typed on a typewriter with the titular foot). It was just that he could not get his words out with clarity, especially as a child, and his gnarled hands made them useless, to go along with useless leg muscles that left him grounded and ultimately relying on a wheelchair. So perhaps an able-bodied person like Day-Lewis could still play this role, under the right circumstances, though we might still cringe to see him twitching and jittering and forcing out the words as through drying cement.
It also occurred to me that cerebral palsy has very different degrees of severity. This was one of the first long-term medical conditions I learned of as a child, as one of my classmates from kindergarten and onward had it. This guy was incredibly smart, and though his words did not sound the same as the other kids', it was always possible to understand what he was saying without any special effort. Danny -- let's call him Danny, because that was his name, kind of like the actor who would go on to play Christy Brown -- may have been one of the lucky ones, as he could walk fine, and did so quite quickly, though with a pronounced dragging of one leg. He did have the somewhat gnarled hands, though he could also use them fine -- in fact, one of his favored activities was sitting with his legs splayed out and smashing the ground in front of him with both hands, like he was playing a big snare drum. In retrospect, I wonder if that was indeed part of the cerebral palsy or if there was a touch of autism thrown in as well.
But back to this film. I was very much impressed with the performance and the filmmaking in general, without being bowled over by any one aspect of it. As I probably could have guessed from the start, My Left Foot was a solid four out of five stars for me, but never truly flirted with that hallowed 4.5 stars.
Incidentally, there are some resources, including Letterboxd, that want me to call this film My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown. That title does appear on screen during the movie. However, it was so popularly advertised as the shorter version of the title that this is what has settled in as its proper title. I kind of wonder if it had been popularly advertised with its full title, if it still would have garnered that best picture nomination, as the inclusion of the last five words tends to remove this from more of an arthouse realm, and place it in more of a "TV movie of the week" realm. Fortunately, the filmmaking is superlative enough to prevent this film, whatever you want to call it, from being mistaken for something from that latter group.
I feel like I haven't said enough of substance about this film. I could go into the plot, but it's probably not necessary. What I really want to say is: 1) very good performance, 2) quite good movie, 3) on to the next one.
As I've said, that next one will be I'm Still Here, whenever it's convenient for me to rent it in the coming months. However, I hope to move back in time to the next preexisting bridesmaid sooner rather than later, and definitely not let another year elapse before I do. When that time comes, it will be John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987), a film I know almost nothing about.
No comments:
Post a Comment