Ruth Madeley plays the protest leader Judy Heumann like an officious Joan of Arc, and Mark Ruffalo is the soul of liberal bureaucratic weariness as the politician she's fighting. There’s a quality that liberal social-protest dramas tend to have in common. They’re usually about revolutionary moments we’re come through and are on the other side of, so they can encourage the audience to feel — with a touch of sanctimony — that yesterday’s revolution was never anything but today’s common sense.
That’s been true of many movies, even some fine ones, about the Civil Rights movement or the gay rights movement. It’s true, as well, of a movie about the fight for union rights like “Norma Rae.” But when you watch “Being Heumann,” a drama about the astonishing 1977 protest that launched the disability-rights revolution (it opened the Toronto International Film Festival tonight), the film doesn’t give you that sanctimonious “Oh, of course” feeling. That’s because the director, Siân Heder, who made a splash five years ago with “CODA” (this is the first film she’s made since), takes pains to preserve, as emotion and drama, the radicalism of what the movie is about.
But Heder uses the authenticity of her casting in a super-sly, double-edged way. She’s following up on what she did in “CODA,” where she placed deaf actors like Troy Kotsur at the center of her story in a way that mainstream movies almost never had. The humanity of her characters transcended their disabilities — yet in a way that’s too simple, since the movie insisted on how central the disabilities were to their identities.
In addition to telling a great story, “CODA” busted through our pieties about how we characterize people. And it’s also structurally bold. The movie chronicles a sit-in, sparked by the disabled-rights leader Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley), that lasted for 28 days, as Huemann and her fellow protesters entered the Federal Building in San Francisco to confront the officials there, and wound up staying in the building — not because they’d planned it that way, but because that’s how the situation evolved.
They were rolling with the punches, the politics, the media, and their own desperate impacted lives of messed-up righteousness. They wouldn’t take no for an answer, and “no” was the only answer they were getting. What they were fighting for was nothing less than the right to be treated — and seen — as full human beings.
Heder echoes the spontaneity of that journey, and mirrors it in how the film invites us to relate to its inspiringly prickly ensemble. The performances have a casual purity, and are often quite forceful, yet when the protesters first come together and we’re getting to know them, there’s a part of us that surveys them and says: Look, it’s a person with MS. It’s a woman in a wheelchair.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
