Normally, this would be the place where I write up some short anecdote about the movie or why I hadn’t seen it before, but instead, I want to talk about how sometimes it can be shocking seeing a familiar face from a time before that face was all that familiar. In the case of My Left Foot, there’s this character named Eileen Cole, a young woman working as a caretaker for the character of Christy Brown, a writer and painter whose cerebral palsy prevents him from having muscle control over anything but his left foot. I kept thinking the actress playing Cole looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. So, I looked her up. The actress was one Fiona Shaw. That name sounded vaguely familiar, but then I saw a much more recent photo and knew why.

Fiona Shaw was Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia. Seeing her as a youthful love interest, even if it wasn’t one who ended up with Christy Brown, was a bit surprising. Quite frankly, I like being surprised like that.

However, that was one small aspect of the movie as a whole. The movie adapts the memoir of the real Christy Brown, a writer and artist who, as stated above, only really had control over his left foot. Born in 1932 to a family of 15 in Ireland, Christy initially had to deal with a lot of people discounting his intelligence because he couldn’t really talk. Only his mother (Brenda Fricker) seems to really give the boy the attention he deserves, to the point when Christy actually gets blamed for causing more trouble when he makes some sudden and drastic moves to help his mother when she passed out on the floor in labor. It is only when he uses his good foot to actually write a legible word that his father (Ray McAnally) will actually proudly claim the boy as a real member of the family. As Christy grows up and becomes Daniel Day-Lewis, he practices his art and writing, and looks for love from a woman.

Much of this movie doesn’t really have a plot so much as it goes through points of Christy’s life to show who he is and how he became an acclaimed writer and artist, and not just because he did it all with a single foot. He actually is talented. During the course of the movie, we see him kick goals in a game of street soccer, play spin-the-bottle, and even start a ballroom brawl. As time passes, Christy even learns how to speak a bit, even if he is hard to understand with my tinnitus.

Daniel Day-Lewis got the first of his three Best Picture Oscars for this movie, and he was a first time nominee at the time. He earned it here. Granted, Day-Lewis has a reputation of being something of a method actor who really digs into a role. He apparently, refused to break character between takes and required a similar level of care as the real Christy, something I am sure did not exactly endear him to many of the cast and crew of this film. For the audience, it was worth the effort. For the people making the movie…that might be another story, though given the acclaim the movie got, I suspect at least a few would find the whole thing worth it.

In many ways, this movie reminded me of the French film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which was also about an artist trapped in his own body, only in that movie’s case, the story was about a man who could only move a single eyelid. If anything, Christy Brown isn’t so much trapped in his body as limited, but the movie acts as an ultimate celebration, with all of life’s ups and downs, of how a man learned to function when his body wouldn’t. He wanted some sense of normality, and the ultimate conclusion is, as celebrated as his work was, what he really wanted was love, and in the end, he got what he really wanted after all.

Grade: A


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