A young American businessman discovers, at his father's death, that he has an autistic brother who has lived for years in an institution for handicapped people—a brother to whom their father left nearly everything.
Driven purely by greed, the young man kidnaps his brother, hoping that gaining guardianship will make him the beneficiary of an enormous inheritance.
But days spent together transform them. Through fragments of childhood memory, the two brothers begin to know and recognize each other. Slowly a bond forms between them, strong enough that neither wants to let go.
That is the plot of Rain Man, a beautiful film whose protagonists are two brothers, one of them living with a form of autism I don't know firsthand—a condition marked by fixations and deficits on one hand, but also extraordinary powers of memory and mathematical ability on the other. My unfamiliarity with this handicap affected how I watched certain scenes; the character sometimes seemed unreal to me, too quick to respond to dialogue and events. What won me over completely was the extraordinary tenderness with which Dustin Hoffman plays him—without caricature, without ridicule, without manipulating the audience's response.
Even in the obsessive repetition of small daily rituals that structure an autistic person's day, the actor shows tremendous respect for the handicap he portrays, and probably for all handicapped people.
The film seems to have two main purposes. First, to bring audiences into contact with a world—the world of handicap—that cinema has rarely explored, and especially with the world of autism, unknown to most and often a source of fear and distrust. Second, to build the entire plot (thin as it is) around the relationship that emerges and deepens between the two brothers. This is a relationship of mutual discovery, not one-sided (the "normal" person and the handicapped person) but genuinely reciprocal. Each brother gradually adapts to the other's nature, personality, and needs, and finds in the other qualities he didn't know were there.
On the whole, a beautiful and important film—one to watch at leisure, alone or with others.
- Antonio Mazzarotto, 1989
(Antonio, 25, has long been active as a friend and coordinator in Fede e Luce communities, and now serves with the Arca community in Rome).