Well, this was unexpected. I knew I would have a harder time saying anything new about films I had covered before. I remembered seeing and reviewing My Left Foot right here as opposed to a quick review on Gabbing Geek or at least a five year old post from the AFI Challenge back in 2018. Naturally, I want to say something new. I figured I could open by pointing out how I saw actress Fiona Shaw in My Left Foot, and I am a lot more familiar with her work now when she is, obviously, much older. But I covered that in my first review. Then I figured I could say something about lead actor Daniel Day-Lewis’s method acting habits that had him demanding he be treated like someone who needs as much help as the real Christy Brown did, but I covered that before too. I really don’t want to repeat myself after all.
So, let’s see what I can come up with from here. I suppose I can discuss the nature of biopics.
My Left Foot is, of course, based on the memoir of the real Christy Brown, a man born to a working class (or lower) Irish family, one of 15 or so children, who had severe cerebal palsy. Despite being seen initially by just about everyone aside from his loving mother (Brenda Flicker) as at best a nuisance and at worst a burden, Christy proves he’s actually brilliant–his father (Ray McAnally) calls his son a “genius” when Christy writes his first word–by showing that he has enough control over his left foot to write and paint. Over time, he even learns how to talk after a fashion. From there, Christy grows as both a man and an artist, doing things that many of us take for granted and, as the closing on-screen text tells us, finds love with a nurse taking care of him, one Mary Carr (Ruth McCabe). That last shot, showing a smiling Christy and Mary, would imply a happy ending.
And, it perhaps wasn’t. I can’t claim to have read Brown’s memoirs, the basis for this film, but just a light perusal of Wikipedia tells me the real marriage between Brown and Carr was perhaps not so nice. Brown died choking to death on a lamb dinner at the age of 49 well before this film came out, and his body supposedly showed signs of abuse. I don’t think anything has ever been proven one way or the other, but at least one of Brown’s brothers insisted Carr was abusive to his brother and not a very good wife even beyond that. Is that true? Again, I didn’t really go looking for details of such things and largely learned that by accident when I went to see whether or not Brown got to see this film. That came about in part when, doing my standard Google Images search for usable pictures for my articles, I came across a headline that said that if director Jim Sheridan were to make this film today, he wouldn’t have cast an able-bodied actor in the main role. Considering this is Daniel Day-Lewis we’re talking about, and he won the first of his three Best Actor Oscars for it in a performance that helped him really make his mark, that’s saying something, and not just that the times are changing.
Here’s the thing: I may know next to nothing about the real Christy Brown, but I likewise didn’t expect this film to teach me much. Don’t get me wrong: My Left Foot is an excellent film and makes lists like the Stacker list for a darn good reason. But like any biopic, I don’t expect it to be completely truthful. For one thing, the basic facts are that Christy Brown’s life would have to be compressed down to, in this case, 103 minutes. That’s not a lot of time to cover decades in any person’s life. For another, elements will be changed to make the story more dramatic. That might mean doing things like suggesting a happier ending for Christy Brown than reality might suggest. Or it could be done by adding suspense or tension where there wasn’t any. In the case of the latter, I think an excellent example might be director Clint Eastwood’s Sully. The actual water landing that Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger made was impressive, especially since everyone survived, but the film needed a dramatic hook, so the government investigation into the crash was made to look far more hostile than it actually was. I’ve noticed that in a few of Eastwood’s more recent films, works that are often biopics of what may be considered American heroes, but whether it’s American Sniper or Richard Jewel, antagonists were added or the more problematic elements of Eastwood’s subjects were removed in order to create dramatic tension, make the film more to the liking of mass audiences, or really just to do what any film sets out to do: tell a compelling story.
All that is a long way of saying that, as much as I enjoyed My Left Foot through both viewings, it’s a film that is more episodic than plot-based. Christy Brown struggles, manages to do things that able-bodied people do all the time, and can’t seem to find love until the last shot, one that may have been a massive lie. Day-Lewis is superb even as he was probably a colossal pain-in-the-ass to work with. The film does a good job of showing how ordinary people with limited means might cope with problems that arise from having a child like Christy, a child his parents love but don’t really know what to do with, and even if Fiona Shaw isn’t some drop-dead gorgeous beauty queen (the sort of actress a lesser film might have cast in that role), it isn’t hard to see why Christy might fall for her even as she is engaged to another man. My Left Foot is very much a triumph of the human mind and spirit, but on a small scale, even if the real Christy Brown was an accomplished and celebrated writer and artist in his own lifetime.
Then again, I still haven’t read any of Brown’s works. I should probably rectify that at some point. Then I might know how accurate this film is.
NEXT: It’s another film I have seen and written about before, but not in a while, and I think I’ll be able to find something new to say anyway about Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-violent Western, 1969’s The Wild Bunch.
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