With worldwide hits such as Untouchable and Rust and Bone, French cinema is changing the way disabled people are portrayed on screen
This year’s Paralympics in London did an extraordinary amount to change attitudes to disabled people. But cinema has been doing its bit too.
In March, Untouchable, the story of the relationship between a quadriplegic and his carer, became the highest-grossing film ever in a language other than English. It’s now taken nearly £250m on a production budget of £7m, topping the box office charts in countries ranging from Switzerland and Spain to Germany and South Korea. It has also been selected as the French entry for the foreign-language Oscar.A hot competitor for that honour was Rust and Bone, in which Marion Cotillard plays a double amputee. The film is still performing healthily in Britain’s arthouses after winning the top prize at the London film festival.
The point about these films is not that they feature disabled protagonists, but the way the films treat the characters. Untouchable centres on the parallels between an able-bodied but socially disadvantaged carer and his disabled charge. Their shared sense of exclusion renders their physical disparity immaterial. In Rust and Bone, disability liberates rather than confines – Cotillard’s character becomes fully human only when she loses her legs.
It hasn’t always been like this. Movies have tended to show disabled people as objects of pity or even comedy, a different breed whose condition subjects them to isolation. Of course, such otherness was simply reflecting the social attitudes of the time, and these began to change during the 1960s and 70s when mainstream society became more inclusive. Cinema – literally shaping the way its subjects were viewed – had the power to advance this process.
But cinema was slow to change its ways. In a book published as recently as 2003, Paul Longmore, polio victim and disability activist, identified a series of persistent stereotypes. There were the deformed bodies, such as Dr Strangelove or Dr No, that reflected a deformed soul. There were the mutants of horror films, sometimes lusting grotesquely after “normal” women, such as the Nazi dwarf in The Black Bird. There were pitiable victims of bigotry – but often even they developed attitudes so warped that they remained outside society. In The Elephant Man and Whose Life Is It Anyway?, suicide has to be the solution. “Better dead than disabled”, as Longmore put it.
Such representations, according to Longmore, reinforced the notion that disability was a divine punishment and that disabled people are a threat: they’re either out of control or, embittered by their fate, eager to avenge themselves on the able-bodied. As such, they’re a nuisance and best separated from normal society.
Actually, things haven’t been quite as bad as Longmore painted them. Cinema has often been compassionate. And yet Hollywood has kept its distance, favouring conditions such as blindness, deafness and discreet mental illnesses which exhibit no outward sign of deformity, though good-looking wheelchair users have proved acceptable. Glamorous stars who render sensitive portrayals of disability are rewarded with Oscar prospects – so long as they haven’t gone “full retard”, as Ben Stiller put it in Tropic Thunder.
Thus, the likes of Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July, Iris and Away from Her, An Affair to Remember, The Bone Collector, A Beautiful Mind, Shine, Wait Until Dark and Children of a Lesser God have often sentimentalised, frequently misinformed and at best encouraged filmgoers to sympathise rather than empathise. Hollywood believed audiences would be repelled by disability; the whole area was assumed to be off-putting, acceptable only if accompanied by a stiff dose of treacle.
Filmgoers themselves were not asked what they thought, until 2008 when the BFI and UKFC commissioned a survey of British attitudes to cinema. One of its many surprising findings was that 40% of respondents thought there were too few films featuring disabled people.
Still, Europe has always been a bit bolder on this front than the US. It was Britain and Ireland that gave us perhaps the most striking film about disability, My Left Foot. France delivered The Diving Bell and the Butterfly after Universal withdrew from the project. Now the French have come up with their two world-beaters, though apparently one potential investor in Untouchable did nervously ask if the protagonist, though paralysed from the neck down, could possibly “walk a little bit”.
Still, if Hollywood isn’t always brave, it recognises hotness when it sees it. Producer Harvey Weinstein grabbed the rights to an English-language remake of Untouchable before the film had even been completed. There have been other signs that Tinseltown is getting with the programme. In James Cameron’s Avatar, Jake Sully is a paralysed former marine who leads a revolution using advanced technology. This chimes with a new public image for disabled people – fostered by the blade-runners of the London Paralympics – as pioneers of cyber-enhancement.
Perhaps more significantly, disability is now visible on the big screen, just as it is in real life. In X-Men: First Class, Charles Xavier’s paralysis is demystified by being attributed to a gunshot wound; he becomes a superhero who just happens to be wheelchair-bound. How to Train Your Dragon’s warrior coach, Gobber the Belch, lost two limbs to one of his antagonists. He parades an array of bizarre prosthetic devices to replace his missing arm, but no one seems to have feared that this might scare the kids.
Joining Untouchable in next year’s Oscar race is Sundance darling The Sessions, whose star John Hawkes is fancied for best actor. Hawkes plays a real-life Boston poet crippled by polio who spends most of his time in an iron lung. Witty and devoid of self-pity, he decides to lose his virginity at the age of 38. Helen Hunt, playing the sex surrogate who obliges him, could well get a supporting actress nomination.
So perhaps things are changing at last. If so, it’s not before time.
Is John Hawkes in ‘The Sessions’ another able-bodied actor playing a disabled part bound for Oscar?
from Entertainment Weekly Inside Movies:
http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/10/19/john-hawkes-the-sessions-able-bodied-actor-disabled-part/
Is John Hawkes in ‘The Sessions’ another able-bodied actor playing a disabled part bound for Oscar?
by Solvej Schou
In The Sessions, opening in theaters this weekend, John Hawkes plays late poet Mark O’Brien, who was paralyzed from the neck down due to polio, and sought, in real life, to lose his virginity by working with a therapeutic sex surrogate. Hawkes is beyond emotionally and physically adept as O’Brien, restricted to laying flat in a huge iron lung, or being wheeled around on a portable cot, his face shifted to the side, his arms pinned to his sides. He’s partially nude at times, staring up at his sex therapist, played by distant-then warm Helen Hunt, and by turns funny, sweet, neurotic and moving. Oscar buzz has been swirling around Hawkes, who told EW at Toronto last month that the role was a challenge, like hungry flies to honey.
If Hawkes is nominated for an Oscar, he’ll join a long line of able-bodied actors and actresses who have been nominated or snagged top acting Academy Awards playing physically disabled – or physically challenged, as others say – roles. While real-life deaf actress Marlee Matlin won a best actress Oscar in 1987 for her part as a deaf pupil in Children of a Lesser God, and Harold Russell, whose hands were amputated after an accident in 1944, nabbed a best supporting actor Oscar trophy in 1947 as a World War II vet in The Best Years of Our Lives, they’re less the norm compared to the long line of able-bodied actors inhabiting those kinds of parts.
There’s Jamie Foxx, who won a best actor Oscar in 2005 as piano-playing and blind R&B impresario Ray Charles in the biopic Ray, Al Pacino, who won an Oscar in 1993 as a blind lieutenant colonel in Scent of a Woman, and Patty Duke, who snatched up a best supporting actress Oscar in 1963 as blind and deaf heroine Helen Keller. Audrey Hepburn was nominated for a lead actress Oscar in 1968 as a blind woman terrorized by criminals in Wait Until Dark.
Among the best known able-bodied performers inhabiting physically disabled starring roles is Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot as true life writer and painter Christy Brown, a smart, creative quadriplegic man born with cerebral palsy, and only able to control his left foot. Day-Lewis was fiercely realistic in the movie, and won a best actor Oscar for it in 1990. That same year, in 1990, Tom Cruise grabbed an Oscar nomination for Born On the Fourth of July, playing real-life Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, who used a wheelchair after becoming paralyzed from the chest down while wounded during the war. Jon Voight also touched on a political and emotional nerve playing a paraplegic Vietnam vet in Coming Home, which won him an Oscar in 1979.
What do actors and actresses within the physically challenged community think about this longtime trend, including the possibility of Hawkes also being in line for an Oscar nod? The response ranges from support of able-bodied performers taking on challenging roles, to the need for more acting opportunities for actually disabled people. The Sessions director Ben Lewin is himself a polio survivor, and did hire some physically disabled actors for the film.
“I do not speak for all performers with disabilities – I’m a double leg amputee for 35 years, after my accident – but John Hawkes’ performance is astounding, and Helen Hunt’s as well. Of the movies I’ve seen so far this year, I think he’s in Oscar contention, and her as well,” CSI: Crime Scene Investigation actor Robert David Hall, chairman of acting union SAG-AFTRA’s Performers with Disabilities Committee, told EW.com. “This is a truthful and moving movie. Ben is a post polio person, and that’s pretty important. I know Ben thought about this when he was beginning to cast the movie. I just ask that people with disabilities are interviewed and auditioned. … There’s always an Oscar buzz if you play a physically disabled person. Thing is, you have to do it well, and affect people. Jon Voight’s portrayal in Coming Home opened people’s eyes for those with disabilities. It’s also a two-edged sword. On one hand I want portrayals to be accurate and honest, whether by a disabled or able-bodied actor, and on the other hand, I want people with disabilities to have more opportunities.”
Hall pointed out that 20 percent of Americans are identified as physically disabled compared to a minute percentage of actors working in the business.
“There’s a huge disconnect. There are a lot of talented people with disabilities trying to make it in the business,” he said. “I like to think of The Sessions as something that will increase awareness. Would it be better without John Hawkes? I don’t think so. It’s a tough business for anyone out there, really. I’m just proud as a human being to say this is a great movie. … There’s not a lot of fake emotion. There’s not a lot of pity. The thing that gets me the most when I see someone disabled in a movie is that they’re portrayed as either super strong or super weak. The humanity is drained out of them. We care about the same things as other people. Having a good time, sexuality. When I worked in radio, nobody cared I had artificial legs.”
For Cindy Allen, who was born with cerebral palsy, uses a wheelchair, and has been a working actress for 30 years, appearing on shows such as ER and Chicago Hope, as well as in movies, it’s also a matter of opportunities, access and talent. Allen’s a longtime member of California’s Media Access Office, which was established in 1980 in part by the California Governor’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities to provide a liaison between performers with disabilities and the media and entertainment industry. However, the office was temporarily discontinued this past week, and folded into the larger umbrella of California’s Employment Development Department, putting more strain on physically disabled actors having help finding jobs, Allen said.
“Playing a disabled role is not about getting an Oscar, it’s about dealing with a disability. Someone without a disability, no matter how much time training, it won’t be the same,” said Allen. “I’m not taking anything away from his [John Hawkes’] acting ability, but there are thousands of equally qualified disabled actors out there who can bring more authenticity to the role. I have been on so many auditions, but people say, ‘You look too disabled.’ What does that mean? Either you want authenticity, or you don’t. … To me, it’s like, there’s no way today, in 2012, that any role that was written for someone who is African-American would be played by a person in black face. It’s the same thing. We’re just going through it 30 years later than Sidney Poitier. There are equally talented people, who just don’t have the same star power. … All I’m asking for as a disabled actor is to have the opportunity first.”