Rain Man

Rating

Director

Barry Levinson

Screenplay

Barry Morrow, Ronald Bass

Length

133 min.

Starring

Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino, Jerry Molen, John Murdock, Michael D. Roberts, Ralph Seymour, Lucinda Jenney, Bonnie Hunt, Kim Robillard

MPAA Rating

R

Review

As we grow up, anything outside the normal is considered foreign and often stigmatized out of ignorance. Rain Man looks at the mental affliction autism and how the world perceives such individuals.

Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) wants a normal life. His latest business venture, importing Lamborghinis and selling them in the United States has hit a major road block and while trying to work out the issues with the Environmental Protection Agency, he receives word of his father’s death. The two men didn’t get along. Charlie never felt he got the respect he deserved and left home at a young age to pursue his own future.

Surprised he is not to find out that all he is left in the will is a car that was the source of much of their conflict and some prized plants. The bulk of the estate, roughly five million dollars, has been put into a trust fund with a secret beneficiary. That suddenly rich individual is Charlie’s long-lost brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) who his father had been visiting regularly at the mental institution where he was kept.

Charlie “kidnaps” his brother and they take a road trip to his home in California where they plan to wage a custody battle over the autistic Raymond. That Charlie learns to love his brother instead of find him a general irritation is all a part of the experience of the film.

Normality is something ingrained in our psyches from an early age. We are taught to look at things that are different from perceived normality as aberrations to be lessened or eliminated. Rain Man does a decent job of portraying such. Through Dustin Hoffman’s terrific performance, we learn an amazing amount about autism. It’s a mental condition that prevents people from leading otherwise “normal” lives. They are unable to keep reality as the world in general knows it in perspective.

In frustration, Charlie admonishes Raymond for being stupid several times early in the film. Whether it’s his unnatural fear of flying, which generated the famous line “Qantas never crashed”, or his insistence on adhering to a television schedule centered around Judge Wapner of The People’s Court. However, this is all part of Raymond’s condition and Charlie slowly comes to understand that about him and accept him as his brother instead of just as a tool for money.

One of the film’s major faults is that if you take out Hoffman’s performance, you’re left with a husk of a film that doesn’t feel as realistic. Cruise does satisfactory work, but his overzealous approach to acting often drags the film down. The film’s acting woes feel more enhanced by director Barry Levinson’s own appearance in the film. It isn’t a cameo appearance like Alfred Hitchcock used to make, it’s an actual character in the film. Instead of hiring an actor who could have given the character more emotional depth, he made a husk of a character usable only as a plot device.

Levinson’s hand on the film is not one of verve or zeal. He has passion for his subject, that is clear, but much of it is journeyman work that any new director could have produced. Rain Man isn’t a bad picture. Every scene relates to the audience the differences and similarities between these men. We leave the film with appreciation and concern for people affected by autism and several quotable quips that have far outlived the message of the movie.

Review Written

January 2, 2007