The '80s. American cinema has a formula and it's sticking to it: monosyllabic musclemen blow shit up. This is what Reagan's children want to see. Not some buddy road movie about a tin-hearted yuppie learning to love his autistic brother. Mind you, $413 million and four Oscars (Film, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay) tell a different story...
Watched now, Barry Levinson's drama makes for intriguing viewing: a carefully assembled mix of art and commerce, contrivance and originality. It opens with young hustler Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) learning of his father's death, the old bastard leaving him nothing more than a '49 Buick. The remainder of the $3-million estate goes to Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), Charlie's autistic brother. The kicker? Charlie never even knew he had a brother.
From here, Rain Man veers into established road-movie territory, Charlie determining to get "his" money by kidnapping Ray from his Cincinnati care home and driving him back to LA. It's an excursion that conveniently takes place on back roads, Ray's fear of planes and interstates allowing Levinson to wallow once more in Diner-esque Americana. And it's a physical exploration that's inevitably paralleled by a psychological one, Charlie's inner journey unspooling with each passing mile. Standard stuff, maybe, but Levinson maps out his route with assurance, while Cruise motors along his predestined arc with conviction.
Where Rain Man surprises, however, is in its truthful portrayal of Raymond, the filmmakers acknowledging that an autistic savant would finish this pilgrimage exactly where he began. Think about it: this is a guy who can memorise the phone book from A to G in one night but has no concrete concept of love; who can tally 246 spilt toothpicks in a second, but who's incapable of subtracting 50 cents from a dollar. He is what he is.
Hoffman inhabits the role with Method precision, but this isn't an exercise in tricks and tics. It's warmer than that, inviting us to care. To fall in love. We do, of course, and our connection startles because we don't see it coming - - Hoffman rarely softens, sculpts or styles his autistic behaviour to lure us in. Instead we get spin-cycled phrases ("'I'm an excellent driver'"), mimicked sound effects ("Ka-Boom!") and Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first base?" routine - - repeated, mantra-like, by Raymond until we're ready to join Charlie in his screaming. Of course, it's annoying. But it's also funny, touching and true, striking chords without ever reducing Raymond to a performing puppy. Definitely.
DVD Extras:
Three commentaries may sound like a good deal, but start wading through these solo efforts and you'll wish Levinson and his two writers (Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow) had recorded a team track. The director is mealy-mouthed, dedicating more time to watching the movie than illuminating it, while Morrow has a distressing knack of telling an interesting tale in an uninteresting way. Only Bass gives good yak for his track, his garrulous gab tracing Rain Man from its pass-the-parcel beginnings (Martin Brest to Steven Spielberg to Sydney Pollack to Barry Levinson) to critical and commercial success.Taken alone, The Journey Of Rain Man makes for compelling if slightly superficial viewing, Levinson telling us how he sought to strip out clichés and melodrama during an eight-week prep. Unfortunately, he also repeats much of the info covered in the commentaries, explaining how he was the fourth helmer totake the steering wheel after... Well, you know that already. It's the other doc, Lifting The Fog: A Look At Autism, that's the real eye-opener, introducing Hoffman's main inspirations Joseph Sullivan and Peter Guthrie.Elsewhere, there's little of note, the obligatory trailer and photo gallery buffering a talking-head featurette (Cruise and Hoffman's sole contribution) and a solitary deleted scene. Hardly "excellent", then, but far from "uh-oh".
