Thinking in Pictures

I saw the Ian Dury biopic last night 'Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll', which featured a bravura performance by Andy Serkis. I won't rehash any reviews of it. My fellow musos - Radio Ulster bloggers Mickey Bradley & Stuart Bailie - have been there, done that and are sporting the proverbial t-shirts!

What struck me though was here's a film with a central character who refers to himself as 'a raspberry ripple', but it isn't a story hung up on disability.

The screenplay by Paul Viragh was beyond box ticking and while it made Dury's disability from childhood polio an important part of the story, the central story was Dury's relationship with his son Baxter.

A very different film to 'Rain Man' (1988). While Dustin Hoffman is textbook brilliant as the autistic Raymond Brabbit, winning an Oscar for his performance, what did it really say about autism, apart from a prodigious talent for doing sums in your head very very fast? 

Twenty-two years later, and a few nights ago on prime time American television, HBO aired another autism-related story. It was 'Temple Grandin' played by Claire Danes, the actress famous to a generation of tweenies in the mid-90's as the heroine of 'My So Called Life'. She's widely tipped to win an Emmy for her performance.

Like Ian Dury, Temple Grandin's story is remarkable. Diagnosed as austistic when she was three-and-a-half, she is now 62-years-old, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University and one of the world leaders in the ethical treatment of animals. I don't quite understand it, but somehow her connection to cows in particular helped revolutionise the world's slaughter houses.

I haven't seen the made for tv movie and can't find any info on the web about a UK broadcast date. But if the reviews from the States are anything to go by it would seem that, like 'Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll', here's another mainstream film that deals with disability, but in the context of an overall complex human life story.

It's good to see that disability can be part of a movie, but not the sum of all its parts.